Toward A New Student Insurgency...Second Article

From co-organizer, David Waggoner:

Greetings friends. It has been such a privilege and pleasure to be a part of the organizing of this project, and I want to thank Teague, Marc Tizoc and Anne for including me. We have had many poignant conversations over the last several months, full of laughs, sighs, moments of silence, expressions of exasperation, and moments of lucidity and excitement about the possibilities before us. And now we are inviting you to join us in dialogue, negotiation and collaboration to provoke, practice, play and postulate in the interests of radical, transformative justice.

While we may take comfort in the process of our struggles, and acknowledge the fluidity and radical subjectivity of our lives, we nonetheless are very much about real outcomes, and developing strategies and tactics that will produce tactile, tangible results for our clients, our communities and ourselves. Housing, healthcare and education are not mere platitudes or the slogans to be affixed to a bumper sticker. Access to life’s basic necessities provides the context for experiencing love and pleasure, and it is for these basic rights we struggle. In that vein, from that heart, we seek to come together to create new moments of resistance, metamorphosis, and radical social transformation which have yet to be realized but are within our grasp. We are realizing the intersectionality and multiplicities of identity and hegemony - and how we are often influenced by the dominant modes of power and unwittingly reproduce what we are trying to fight - in ways that are truly opening up completely new opportunities to be in coalition, new opportunities to create fresh critique, and previously unconsidered methods of radical change.

Together, we can draw out from one another the hidden thoughts that will provide the glue to build a thousand thousand experiences of justice that one can taste, hear, touch, smell and feel. There is no reason why we can not provoke in one another – vis-à-vis questions, visions, critique, spontaneous exuberance – more that we ever thought we were capable of to realize exponential well being. We can escape the Socratic method, the desire to control and be controlled, the hegemony of IRAC, the fascism of the four corners of the document and “thinking like a lawyer,” to embrace completely new ways of being human, of being advocates, of using the law to love, of grinding the bones of racism and misogyny to dust. So many briefs remain to be written, arguments to be made, laws to be repealed, judges to be disqualified, communities to be organized, class actions to be certified…

Elvia Arriola is one of many, many people who have begun to show us the way. I hope you will find her remarks as nuanced and enlightening as I did. I look forward to seeing you all soon.

Love and Revolt,

David

RESPIRO LIBRE:1 COMING HOME TO A LATINA LESBIAN SELF: Race and Sexual Orientation in Legal Scholarship

Remarks of Elvia R. Arriola

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS SCHOOL OF LAW

Lesbian and Gay Section of the Association of American Law Schools Meeting

Friday, January 9, 1998, San Francisco, California

Good Afternoon. I feel I have been trying to have this conversation for such a long time. I can't help but feel emotional as I stand before you to have this discussion on race and sexual orientation in legal scholarship. I have been writing about and been involved as a feminist Latina lesbian scholar for so many years. And for so many of those years, as I think back upon the environments or the conditions surrounding my work, I can't help but remember how alone I often felt because of the intersectional nature of my identity, as not only lesbian and feminist but also Latina. I remember for example, when I was writing my very first law review article -- as I was coming out as a lesbian and also budding as a civil rights lawyer in the early eighties in New York City. At times I felt very connected to the gay and lesbian civil rights community I was coming to know personally and professionally through my progressive contacts. For awhile, after my post- graduate fellowship at the ACLU National Headquarters, I volunteered my legal services for Lambda Legal Defense and met wonderful people who helped me feel proud of the fact that I had the courage to come out publicly as a lesbian. But so many other times I felt disconnected completely from these same people; I felt the conspicuousness of my brown skin and Spanish surname when I sat in huge conference rooms as the lone minority among over two dozen other lawyers and activists, deliberating, for example, the litigation strategies for the then upcoming hearing by the Supreme Court in the Bowers v. Hardwick.

To read the complete article, go to:

http://www.ibiblio.org/gaylaw/issue6/Arriola.htm

Toward a New Student Insurgency...First Reading

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

Toward a New Student Insurgency: Critical Legal Theory and Multidimensional Social Justice

Queridas/os (dear ones):

At the upcoming National Lawyers Guild ("NLG") "Law for the People" convention, to be held in Washington, D.C., Oct. 31 - Nov. 4, 2007, a group of NLG members affiliated with the NLG's The United People of Color Caucus ("TUPOCC") and its Queer Caucus will lead a workshop, Toward a New Student Insurgency: Critical Legal Theory and Multidimensional Social Justice. See generally http://nlg.org/convention/. The workshop will be held on Saturday Nov. 3, during the 1:00-2:15pm workshop time slot. See http://nlg.org/convention/conv_schedule.php.

A description of the workshop follows. In subsequent posts, we will propose texts to read and discuss via this TUPOCC blog, "Legal Activists of Color." We invite people of good will to join us from throughout the NLG community and beyond -- both to read and discuss these texts and to meet in November in Washington, D.C.

Much love,

Marc-Tizoc González

+++++

We have imagined and designed this workshop to catalyze NLG members’ self-education about critical legal theory’s insights into the multidimensionality of social justice.

By gathering NLG members of diverse backgrounds, identifications and interests, we plan to increase our understanding of the multiple dimensions in which power, oppression and radical possibility exist and operate. Moreover, the workshop will provide the opportunity to organize local reading and discussion groups from physically proximate NLG members, which we will connect into a network via online communication technologies.

By regularly discussing our local sociolegal conditions and multidimensional struggles in relation to texts of critical legal theory, NLG members will cultivate a sense of community based on shared antisubordination principles, community-based lawyering and ethical living practices. In collaborating across the U.S., Guild members can share how we have concretely related critical legal theory to our legal education and legal work and can evolve a multidimensional social justice praxis that transcends older models of lawyering into a new student- and youth-oriented insurgency.

The workshop will feature a discussion of key concepts pertaining to its goals, a brief speech by a TUPOCC co-chair, breakout sessions to form nascent reading-and-discussion groups, and a group discussion about transcending oppressive boundaries and resisting our normative socialization into the legal profession. Prior to the workshop, we will suggest readings and promote initial discussion online via the TUPOCC blog.