The first reading in our series is Francisco Valdez's "INSISTING ON CRITICAL THEORY IN LEGAL EDUCATION: MAKING DO WHILE MAKING WAVES".
We hope that after reading the article, you will post your thoughts/reflections/questions to the comments section of this blog posting. The blog is open to POC and our allies.
An excerpt:
"... Since the time that I walked this campus as an undergraduate student, and during these 24 years of your average lifetimes, this nation has become engulfed by a culture war - or, to use Antonin Scalia's quaintly vicious phrase, by a "Kulturkampf" - designed to reinscribe and reinforce inequality normatively and legally. ... These examples illustrate not only the breathtaking success and basic mean-spiritedness of today's culture war, but also grave constitutional failures, for they are paragons of "popular tyranny" - they typify the oppression of the weak by the powerful, which the
adoption of the constitution was supposed to prevent even, or, rather, especially when the name of "democracy' is dragged out to justify majoritarian factionalism and its predictable output: abusive lawmaking; that is, lawmaking that abuses formal control over the State to contrive and arrogate in-group privilege and impose outgroup disorganization, disempowerment and dispossession by legal fiat. ... Thus, it should come as no or little surprise that the law school curriculum resists the integration of critical theory into legal education: imagine if they taught us, as a matter of course
in the first year, what we need to know to pierce through what they currently do teach us, as a matter of course, in the first year. ... These activist efforts, guided by OutCrit and LatCrit theorizing, are designed to produce substantive and institutional social justice change through the practice of theoretical insights, and of the commitments that flow from critical theory and its insights...".
Please find the entire article at:
http://www.law.miami.edu/publications/images/12_la_raza_l_j_137.pdf
In organizing this workshop, our group posed many questions to one another. This article was Marc-Tizoc's response to my questioning the validity of theorizing when discussing communities under siege. What is the function of theory when organizing community? What is the most effective way to connect theory and practice, or praxis?
This article does a very good job of answering some of these questions and leaves me with many more. I hope we can discuss this together online and in DC.
Thank you,
Teague
Monday, October 22, 2007
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4 comments:
Frank Valdes's theorizing about the "culture war" is highly relevant to recent concerns expressed in the TUPOCC Y! group and elsewhere about David Horowitz's call to action this week.
Informed by Valdes's explication of the "three lines or prongs of attack, and their interaction" of the "culture war" (capture of the representative branches of gov't, massive court-packing, and targeted control of the spending power), I believe that those three prongs are complemented by a profound ideological shift.
What I mean is that even using Horowitz's phraseology makes the neoconservative ideology encroach on people of good will.
We must dispute Horowitz and others' sophistry: fascism historically related to a set of European or Euro-centric totalitarian regimes, e.g., Nazi Germany or Pinochet's Chile. The notion of fascism may also be useful to understanding changes in the U.S. since the "judicial coup" of the 2000 presidential elections and what the Bush regime has promulgated thereafter, e.g., the USA Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act, etc.
Holding onto our own definitions of fascism, we can see Horowitz's call for action looks more like a calculated media blitz and fundraiser for him, his organization and related individuals and groups.
Critical sociolegal theory helps me parse these thoughts. What do you think?
And the Bush administration has put into practice the obscure theory of the unitary executive. Although it's tagged as "imperial", it's modern and American with echoes of facism. John Yoo, it's key proponent in the DOJ, has quickly become the most broadly recognized API legal scholar (as well as despised). Valdes bares what's really going on in this "elected" government. The major reformist effort in many of our communities is to get out the vote to turn these majorities around. As it is we see more tokenism in higher gov't positions, the latest, Gov-elect of Louisiana and Punjabi, Bobby Jindal. As legal workers then how do we best deconstruct this? in theory and practice?
Hello comrades...thanks for this article. It actually resonated for me on a lot of levels - especially as a law student, with respect to what we are taught (or indoctrinated with) in law schools, and as an activist, with respect to approaching solidarity work in a way that does not reinforce or prop up or create discourses and narratives that are the sources and structures of oppression.
Marc-Tizoc, I agree with your comments, and see this in large part as reinforcing a commitment to naming and framing oppression, and owning and/or reclaiming our narratives as affected communities. I actually thought of the following quote from the Free Palestine Alliance that addresses the profound impact that manipulation of historical narratives that should be owned and told by affected communities can have on the struggle for liberation:
"Attempts to reduce the Palestinian struggle for liberation to that of a border dispute are underway. This is a dangerous process. It replaces the fundamental goal of liberation with an immediate partial relief from current Israeli policies. In that context, Palestine as a whole is re-configured politically and geographically to only equal areas within the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. History is re-constituted to produce an alternative narrative written for the Palestinian people and not by them. [...]
Ours, therefore, is also a battle of narratives and a struggle over the ownership of history. And as we set out to tell our story, we insist on fighting for every sentence and every word of that narrative, for it is a narrative formed at every turn by our pains and triumphs."
I feel like that quote is applicable on many fronts of the struggle for the liberation of all oppressed people. Thanks for the thought provoking piece comrades.
What narrative can be applied to yesterday's mass arrests of rights workers and lawyers in Pakistan - their fierce resistance the Musharraf regime. CNN's coverage made no attempt to explain why - instead coupled imagery of "suits" being clubbed with Taliban firing RPGs - turmoil and instability. Musharaf suspended the constitution and fired Supreme Court justices. Valdez discussed the prongs of attack on the US constitution. How do we apply theory/practice in support of the Pakistani lawyers? Makes one speculate when we use equivalent tactics in the US.
Rob
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