Negotiating Justice: Progressive Lawyering, Low-Income Clients, and the Quest for Social Change

by Corey Shdaimah

While many young people become lawyers for the big bucks, others are motivated by the pursuit of social justice, seeking to help people for whom legal services are financially, socially, or politically inaccessible. These progressive lawyers often bring a considerable degree of idealism to their work, and many leave the field due to insurmountable red tape and spiraling disillusionment. But what about those who stay? And what do their clients think? Negotiating Justice explores how progressive lawyers and their clients negotiate the dissonance between personal idealism and the realities of a system that doesn’t often champion the rights of the poor.
Corey S. Shdaimah draws on over fifty interviews with urban legal service lawyers and their clients to provide readers with a compelling behind-the-scenes look at how different notions of practice can present significant barriers for both clients and lawyers working with limited resources, often within a legal system that many view as fundamentally unequal or hostile. Through consideration of the central themes of progressive lawyering—autonomy, collaboration, transformation, and social change—Shdaimah presents a subtle and complex tableau of the concessions both lawyers and clients often have to make as they navigate the murky and resistant terrains of the legal system and their wider pursuits of justice and power.

Genres: Law

242 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 2009

Reviews

[John Bruning · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lot of what Shdaimah does/attempts to do here is admirable; little scholarship focuses on how clients and attorneys together build meaning. If you're reading this as a how-to guide for progressive lawyering, working in legal services, or legal reform, you'll likely be disappointed and underwhelmed. There isn't a lot of substance here, and many of the quotations should have been edited (how many "you knows" and "likes" and "I means" interrupt otherwise thoughtful comments from lawyers and clients, to the point of being distracting?).

All in all, I think the book is worth engaging with, but you can probably do that just as well by skipping for subject headings as by closely reading it.