The Yale Law Journal

VOLUME
132
2022-2023
Forum Collection

Law and Movements: Clinical Perspectives

18 Nov 2022
Family LawImmigration Law

As law-school clinics assume a growing role in legal education, instructors, students, and community partners have used clinics to test novel, sometimes radical lawyering approaches. This Collection draws from those experiments, using case studies from family defense, immigration, and worker rights to explore the relationship between law and social movements.

Forum

Transformative Immigration Lawyering

Jayesh Rathod

Two deep-seated tendencies in U.S. immigration law are obstructing the expansive reforms long sought by movement actors: incrementalism and path dependence. This Essay recommends that law clinics counter these forces by setting ambitious goals for structural change and by equipping students with kno…

Forum

Radical Early Defense Against Family Policing

Julia Hernandez & Tarek Z. Ismail

What possibilities arise when law-school clinics experiment in challenging a well-oiled system at its untouched margins, within a collective, community-based movement whose lodestar is abolition? This Essay examines this question in the family-policing context and articulates a radical vision of fam…

Forum

Pedagogy of Prefiguration

Sameer M. Ashar

Social movements are engaged in prefigurative thinking, outside of the terms and constraints of our present moment of global climate emergency and democratic crisis. This Essay asks how we may teach ourselves—lawyers and law students—to work with social-movement organizations on projects that prefig…