#BlackLivesMatter is not only a criminal law issue, but also an issue of economic justice and pol... more #BlackLivesMatter is not only a criminal law issue, but also an issue of economic justice and political empowerment within urban centers that face increasing income inequality and gentrification. This concurrent session will engage participants in the economic justice work of community economic development and transactional law clinics in Baltimore and Washington, D.C. Our clinic work with community-based organizations aims to capture and anchor capital that is essential to redressing community members’ economic inequality, via new economic institutions, community-owned institutions, and social enterprises; and build capacity within community-based organizations to further their efforts to increase political and economic power within poor and low-income communities. Participants will hear from clinical law professors from Baltimore and Washington, D.C. law schools. Our work includes legal representation of community land trusts, limited equity cooperatives, worker cooperatives, nonprofits, social enterprises, churchbased credit unions, and entrepreneurs who are returning citizens. Participants in this concurrent session will: •Learn about the collaborations between clinics and community-based groups in Baltimore and Washington, D.C. to combat social and economic injustice; • Learn methods to build capacity within communitybased groups; Understand the learning objectives that students acquire from working with community-based groups, which include both lawyering skills and tools to combat income inequality and other economic injustices; and Understand the challenges of engaging in community-based work, and come away with concrete tools for positioning clinics to engage in movement work that is timely but often unpredictable and not neatly packaged for student involvement
Moderator: Sara Gold, Visiting Assistant Professor, University of Maryland Francis King Carey Sch... more Moderator: Sara Gold, Visiting Assistant Professor, University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law
This Article examines the import of the life’s work of Saul Alinsky—arguably the most prominent f... more This Article examines the import of the life’s work of Saul Alinsky—arguably the most prominent founder of contemporary organizing—to the content and methodologies of today’s legal education. I review the community organizing theory and practice of Saul Alinsky for its synergies and lessons on two approaches by legal theorists and educators working in law schools today — “community lawyering” and “social justice”education. These approaches embrace the special responsibility of the legal profession for the quality of justice in society[1] by extending the traditional conceptions of lawyers’ relationships with clients in ways that are informed by the insights of community organizers, such as Alinsky. Rather than “justice” or the confrontation so often associated with the Industrial Areas Foundation (the “IAF”), Alinsky’s true touchstone was democratic participation. The quality of democracy is everybody’s business; and more to the point of this Article, democracy is not the central co...
The University of Maryland and the Fetzer Institute are co-creating a leadership development prog... more The University of Maryland and the Fetzer Institute are co-creating a leadership development program for law students and practicing lawyers, which through clinical work in collaboration with community leaders, aims to forge new approaches to legal service delivery and ...
In 1985, the United States sought and obtained the indictment of two nuns, a Protestant minister,... more In 1985, the United States sought and obtained the indictment of two nuns, a Protestant minister, two Quakers, several lay Catholic and Protestant employees of church-sponsored social services, and members of religious congregations, for their work in assisting Central American refugees to enter and find safe haven in this country, despite the efforts of Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) efforts to capture and return them. The "sanctuary movement" was a church community awakened by refugees' eyewitness accounts of death squads, torture, and the disappearance of citizens and of church aid and other humanitarian aid workers. For North Americans, these accounts provoked a double trauma: the knowledge of extensive human rights abuses in Central America by United States supported forces, coupled with the refusal of the United States government to harbor refugees until the hostilities in El Salvador abated. By the time of the Tucson indictment, the Sanctuary Movem...
The University of Maryland and the Fetzer Institute are co-creating a leadership development prog... more The University of Maryland and the Fetzer Institute are co-creating a leadership development program for law students and practicing lawyers, which through clinical work in collaboration with community leaders, aims to forge new approaches to legal service delivery and ...
Imagine your city free of poverty, racism, violence. Now consider, how does the law you teach or ... more Imagine your city free of poverty, racism, violence. Now consider, how does the law you teach or practice bring that vision closer to reality? I ask myself this question, in response to a key flexion point in Professor Haber's article, CED After #OWS, 1 which urges Community Economic Development ("CED") lawyers to assess how tame the social justice dimension of much CED law practice has become in the decades since its rebellious origins in the 1960s and 1970s era of civil rights and antiwar activism. Does CED practice hew so closely to establishment legal institutions that it impedes the transformative social justice aspirations of the communities in which we work? In this Essay, I consider the tensions set up between 'being the change' in the prefigurative sense that the Occupy Wall Street ("#OWS") movement activism popularized, and Haber extols; and 'building the change,' a common rationale for much community-led CED practice that is criticized as smallball and insufficiently impactful both locally and on the scale of social justice imperatives addressed by social movement activism. CED After #OWS suggests that now is the time to move on from aiding people in establishing their own community-led, community-benefiting alternative institutions to mediate the structures that impoverish and imperil their neighborhoods, 2 in favor of more frankly politically conscious and activist "anti-authoritarian community counter-institutions." 3
Economic life in the PRC today is marked by rapid privatization, marketization, and urbanization.... more Economic life in the PRC today is marked by rapid privatization, marketization, and urbanization. This triad of forces effects a profound restructuring of China's urban spaces and is giving rise to new forms of private, voluntary associations of citizens such as neighborhood campaigns of resistance to urban redevelopment. Civil society theory ascribes to such organizations outside of state control, the potential to constrain government officials by enabling citizens to express their collective interests more effectively, and to resist government encroachment more powerfully than they otherwise could. Because resort to China's courts has produced little protection for citizens' formal legal rights in the event of forced demolition, relocation, and compensation, urban homeowners have resorted to extra-legal modes of resistance including protests, petitions, and confrontations - some of them deadly. This article assesses the potential to construct an 'accountable develo...
When Congress reformed welfare in 1996, eliminating the Aid to Families with Dependent Children p... more When Congress reformed welfare in 1996, eliminating the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program and creating the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant, the design of welfare programs nationwide changed dramatically. 1 States receive federal dollars based upon a formula that incorporates the amount of funds they received in 1994 under Aid to Families with Dependent Children; this primarily reflects their cash assistance caseloads at that time. Due to the significant declines in caseloads since then, states have accumulated financial resources that enable them to design their programs differently. 2 States are using some of these funds to provide job readiness, job search, and job placement services. Many have reinvested these savings to address the work barriers many parents face and to give low-income working families access to strong work supports, such as child care, transportation resources, education and training, and state earned income tax credits....
Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005, as this country's most destructiv... more Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005, as this country's most destructive natural disaster. Category Four hurricane force winds, 55-foot sea waves, and a 30-foot wall of water crashed into the Mississippi Gulf Coast, raced inland for over ten miles, then swept up swirling rivers and bayous in a final surge back to the Gulf of Mexico. The national narrative remembers the flooding of New Orleans, but forgets that Katrina dashed lives and property for a distance equal to that from Boston to Baltimore. Hundreds of thousands of homes were crushed in Katrina's wake, along with neighborhoods and generations of a way of life. Decimating every mile of the Mississippi coastline, the combined initial assault and the storm surge took hundreds of lives, rendered homeless tens of thousands of survivors, and left well over $1 billion in property damage in the state. While the 400,000 residents of the three coastal counties were most directly impacted, the hurricane eve...
This essay argues that the teaching-doing tightrope bemoaned among clinicians, while posing real ... more This essay argues that the teaching-doing tightrope bemoaned among clinicians, while posing real tensions, is overdrawn. The asserted dichotomy is between the demands of teaching legal theory and of doing daily law practice for clients enmeshed in poverty. The dichotomy is misleading because the development of transformative legal theory arises repeatedly on the front lines of client work, and interdependently with the works of attentive scholars. Two bellwether cases, Goldberg v. Kelly and Javins v. First National Realty, illustrate the vital interdependence of justice-seeking scholarship and justice-serving representation of clients in challenging the reigning structure of legal rules and constraining institutions. Ditching the misleading dichotomy is crucial at this point in the nation's legal evolution, when the justice claims of the poor urgently require deeper legal traction. The author urges a renewed embrace of the robust, social-justice form of "doing-theory" ...
#BlackLivesMatter is not only a criminal law issue, but also an issue of economic justice and pol... more #BlackLivesMatter is not only a criminal law issue, but also an issue of economic justice and political empowerment within urban centers that face increasing income inequality and gentrification. This concurrent session will engage participants in the economic justice work of community economic development and transactional law clinics in Baltimore and Washington, D.C. Our clinic work with community-based organizations aims to capture and anchor capital that is essential to redressing community members’ economic inequality, via new economic institutions, community-owned institutions, and social enterprises; and build capacity within community-based organizations to further their efforts to increase political and economic power within poor and low-income communities. Participants will hear from clinical law professors from Baltimore and Washington, D.C. law schools. Our work includes legal representation of community land trusts, limited equity cooperatives, worker cooperatives, nonprofits, social enterprises, churchbased credit unions, and entrepreneurs who are returning citizens. Participants in this concurrent session will: •Learn about the collaborations between clinics and community-based groups in Baltimore and Washington, D.C. to combat social and economic injustice; • Learn methods to build capacity within communitybased groups; Understand the learning objectives that students acquire from working with community-based groups, which include both lawyering skills and tools to combat income inequality and other economic injustices; and Understand the challenges of engaging in community-based work, and come away with concrete tools for positioning clinics to engage in movement work that is timely but often unpredictable and not neatly packaged for student involvement
Moderator: Sara Gold, Visiting Assistant Professor, University of Maryland Francis King Carey Sch... more Moderator: Sara Gold, Visiting Assistant Professor, University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law
This Article examines the import of the life’s work of Saul Alinsky—arguably the most prominent f... more This Article examines the import of the life’s work of Saul Alinsky—arguably the most prominent founder of contemporary organizing—to the content and methodologies of today’s legal education. I review the community organizing theory and practice of Saul Alinsky for its synergies and lessons on two approaches by legal theorists and educators working in law schools today — “community lawyering” and “social justice”education. These approaches embrace the special responsibility of the legal profession for the quality of justice in society[1] by extending the traditional conceptions of lawyers’ relationships with clients in ways that are informed by the insights of community organizers, such as Alinsky. Rather than “justice” or the confrontation so often associated with the Industrial Areas Foundation (the “IAF”), Alinsky’s true touchstone was democratic participation. The quality of democracy is everybody’s business; and more to the point of this Article, democracy is not the central co...
The University of Maryland and the Fetzer Institute are co-creating a leadership development prog... more The University of Maryland and the Fetzer Institute are co-creating a leadership development program for law students and practicing lawyers, which through clinical work in collaboration with community leaders, aims to forge new approaches to legal service delivery and ...
In 1985, the United States sought and obtained the indictment of two nuns, a Protestant minister,... more In 1985, the United States sought and obtained the indictment of two nuns, a Protestant minister, two Quakers, several lay Catholic and Protestant employees of church-sponsored social services, and members of religious congregations, for their work in assisting Central American refugees to enter and find safe haven in this country, despite the efforts of Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) efforts to capture and return them. The "sanctuary movement" was a church community awakened by refugees' eyewitness accounts of death squads, torture, and the disappearance of citizens and of church aid and other humanitarian aid workers. For North Americans, these accounts provoked a double trauma: the knowledge of extensive human rights abuses in Central America by United States supported forces, coupled with the refusal of the United States government to harbor refugees until the hostilities in El Salvador abated. By the time of the Tucson indictment, the Sanctuary Movem...
The University of Maryland and the Fetzer Institute are co-creating a leadership development prog... more The University of Maryland and the Fetzer Institute are co-creating a leadership development program for law students and practicing lawyers, which through clinical work in collaboration with community leaders, aims to forge new approaches to legal service delivery and ...
Imagine your city free of poverty, racism, violence. Now consider, how does the law you teach or ... more Imagine your city free of poverty, racism, violence. Now consider, how does the law you teach or practice bring that vision closer to reality? I ask myself this question, in response to a key flexion point in Professor Haber's article, CED After #OWS, 1 which urges Community Economic Development ("CED") lawyers to assess how tame the social justice dimension of much CED law practice has become in the decades since its rebellious origins in the 1960s and 1970s era of civil rights and antiwar activism. Does CED practice hew so closely to establishment legal institutions that it impedes the transformative social justice aspirations of the communities in which we work? In this Essay, I consider the tensions set up between 'being the change' in the prefigurative sense that the Occupy Wall Street ("#OWS") movement activism popularized, and Haber extols; and 'building the change,' a common rationale for much community-led CED practice that is criticized as smallball and insufficiently impactful both locally and on the scale of social justice imperatives addressed by social movement activism. CED After #OWS suggests that now is the time to move on from aiding people in establishing their own community-led, community-benefiting alternative institutions to mediate the structures that impoverish and imperil their neighborhoods, 2 in favor of more frankly politically conscious and activist "anti-authoritarian community counter-institutions." 3
Economic life in the PRC today is marked by rapid privatization, marketization, and urbanization.... more Economic life in the PRC today is marked by rapid privatization, marketization, and urbanization. This triad of forces effects a profound restructuring of China's urban spaces and is giving rise to new forms of private, voluntary associations of citizens such as neighborhood campaigns of resistance to urban redevelopment. Civil society theory ascribes to such organizations outside of state control, the potential to constrain government officials by enabling citizens to express their collective interests more effectively, and to resist government encroachment more powerfully than they otherwise could. Because resort to China's courts has produced little protection for citizens' formal legal rights in the event of forced demolition, relocation, and compensation, urban homeowners have resorted to extra-legal modes of resistance including protests, petitions, and confrontations - some of them deadly. This article assesses the potential to construct an 'accountable develo...
When Congress reformed welfare in 1996, eliminating the Aid to Families with Dependent Children p... more When Congress reformed welfare in 1996, eliminating the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program and creating the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant, the design of welfare programs nationwide changed dramatically. 1 States receive federal dollars based upon a formula that incorporates the amount of funds they received in 1994 under Aid to Families with Dependent Children; this primarily reflects their cash assistance caseloads at that time. Due to the significant declines in caseloads since then, states have accumulated financial resources that enable them to design their programs differently. 2 States are using some of these funds to provide job readiness, job search, and job placement services. Many have reinvested these savings to address the work barriers many parents face and to give low-income working families access to strong work supports, such as child care, transportation resources, education and training, and state earned income tax credits....
Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005, as this country's most destructiv... more Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005, as this country's most destructive natural disaster. Category Four hurricane force winds, 55-foot sea waves, and a 30-foot wall of water crashed into the Mississippi Gulf Coast, raced inland for over ten miles, then swept up swirling rivers and bayous in a final surge back to the Gulf of Mexico. The national narrative remembers the flooding of New Orleans, but forgets that Katrina dashed lives and property for a distance equal to that from Boston to Baltimore. Hundreds of thousands of homes were crushed in Katrina's wake, along with neighborhoods and generations of a way of life. Decimating every mile of the Mississippi coastline, the combined initial assault and the storm surge took hundreds of lives, rendered homeless tens of thousands of survivors, and left well over $1 billion in property damage in the state. While the 400,000 residents of the three coastal counties were most directly impacted, the hurricane eve...
This essay argues that the teaching-doing tightrope bemoaned among clinicians, while posing real ... more This essay argues that the teaching-doing tightrope bemoaned among clinicians, while posing real tensions, is overdrawn. The asserted dichotomy is between the demands of teaching legal theory and of doing daily law practice for clients enmeshed in poverty. The dichotomy is misleading because the development of transformative legal theory arises repeatedly on the front lines of client work, and interdependently with the works of attentive scholars. Two bellwether cases, Goldberg v. Kelly and Javins v. First National Realty, illustrate the vital interdependence of justice-seeking scholarship and justice-serving representation of clients in challenging the reigning structure of legal rules and constraining institutions. Ditching the misleading dichotomy is crucial at this point in the nation's legal evolution, when the justice claims of the poor urgently require deeper legal traction. The author urges a renewed embrace of the robust, social-justice form of "doing-theory" ...
he Cambridge Handbook on Innovations in Commons, 2020
Community land trust practice in the US maps onto the commons institutions frame developed throu... more Community land trust practice in the US maps onto the commons institutions frame developed through the pioneering work of Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues; but not all CLTs function as commons institutions. This paper seeks to distinguish CLTs that function as a commons from CLTs that function as housing providers, a critical distinction that often gets lost in the literature and in the analyses of CLTs. The CLT-as-Commons analysis here emphasizes two characteristics of enduring commons institutions in Ostrom’s canon: self-governance, and rules for the transgenerational resource-preservation in commons ‘management.’ The CLT-as-Commons inquiry is prompted by the ubiquity of CLTs in fair development movements, metaphorically reclaiming commons for the commoners in the context of vacant disinvested housing that would otherwise be claimed by the private sector or the State. This analysis is particularly salient in cities of neighborhoods pockmarked by longstanding vacancy and disinvestment. Community Land Trusts (CLTs) are part of nearly every progressive response to today’s affordable housing crisis because they offer an intermediate form of land ownership and control between the speculative market and the State; yet its distinct tenure and shared-equity legal structure are not a sufficient basis to categorize every CLT as a commons institution, at least as scholars have defined it. This is because, while CLTs increasingly are promoted in housing policy circles as an economically efficient form of affordable housing, insufficient attention is given to the CLT operational and cultural dimensions, particularly with respect to sustaining community control of the land and housing. Overemphasizing access to an opportunity for affordable home ownership tends to suppress the central features of classic-form CLTs, which are based on collective governance by an elected group of CLT-land residents, CLT members who are non-resident neighbors, and supportive stakeholders, who manage and govern the CLT land to assure its transgenerational and multi-stakeholder purposes. To succeed as a self-governing CLT-Commons requires constructing that commons through robust practices of stewardship, which build the CLT knowledge commons within the CLT membership in order to elevate and sustain the corresponding community interests on par with the member interest as CLT “homeowner.” A CLT-as-Commons must do more than hold a portfolio of housing units in trust across generations at below-market sales prices. It must construct the cultural commons — that essential CLT knowledge, its re-production and distribution, and the commons members’ capacity for efficacious self-management—necessary to steward the land as the community of members determines for generations.
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Papers by Barbara Bezdek
The CLT-as-Commons inquiry is prompted by the ubiquity of CLTs in fair development movements, metaphorically reclaiming commons for the commoners in the context of vacant disinvested housing that would otherwise be claimed by the private sector or the State. This analysis is particularly salient in cities of neighborhoods pockmarked by longstanding vacancy and disinvestment. Community Land Trusts (CLTs) are part of nearly every progressive response to today’s affordable housing crisis because they offer an intermediate form of land ownership and control between the speculative market and the State; yet its distinct tenure and shared-equity legal structure are not a sufficient basis to categorize every CLT as a commons institution, at least as scholars have defined it. This is because, while CLTs increasingly are promoted in housing policy circles as an economically efficient form of affordable housing, insufficient attention is given to the CLT operational and cultural dimensions, particularly with respect to sustaining community control of the land and housing. Overemphasizing access to an opportunity for affordable home ownership tends to suppress the central features of classic-form CLTs, which are based on collective governance by an elected group of CLT-land residents, CLT members who are non-resident neighbors, and supportive stakeholders, who manage and govern the CLT land to assure its transgenerational and multi-stakeholder purposes.
To succeed as a self-governing CLT-Commons requires constructing that commons through robust practices of stewardship, which build the CLT knowledge commons within the CLT membership in order to elevate and sustain the corresponding community interests on par with the member interest as CLT “homeowner.” A CLT-as-Commons must do more than hold a portfolio of housing units in trust across generations at below-market sales prices. It must construct the cultural commons — that essential CLT knowledge, its re-production and distribution, and the commons members’ capacity for efficacious self-management—necessary to steward the land as the community of members determines for generations.