Alexander ’13 Speaks on Community Organizing and Lawyering

On March 2, Amanda Alexander ’13 returned to Yale Law School to speak at the Schell Center’s Human Rights Workshop about what responsible and effective lawyering looks like in the age of Black Lives Matter. Alexander serves on the steering committee of Law for Black Lives, a national network of lawyers committed to building the power of the Black Lives Matter movement. In her talk, she supported Law for Black Lives’ understanding of “movement lawyering”—“taking direction from directly impacted communities and from organizers, as opposed to imposing our leadership or expertise as legal advocates.”

After graduating Yale Law School in 2013, Alexander founded the Prison & Family Justice Project (PFJP) at the University of Michigan Law School, as a 2013–2015 Soros Justice Fellow. The Project serves families divided by incarceration and the foster care system using a combination of direct representation and know-your-rights education, targeted litigation, and advocacy. PFJP recently partnered on "Who Pays?”, a groundbreaking national study on the cost of incarceration on families. Alexander is now an assistant professor and postdoctoral scholar in Afro-American studies and law at the University of Michigan, where she teaches courses on movement lawyering and community organizing.

Alexander began her talk at the Schell Center by describing herself as an “organizer with legal skills,” and by advising students to put their legal skills to use in their communities. But she was clear that “law is not enough: sometimes, as lawyers we look at problems and turn them into rights, but when we’re talking about neglect and abandonment, this is an inadequate framework—the problem goes much deeper than the solutions offered.” She stressed that an important aspect of community-based lawyering is recognizing that sometimes “law can only provide half-answers.”

Alexander brought up the work of activists in Detroit and explained, “It was community organizers, not lawyers, who rose to the challenge and brought attention to the tens of thousands of people shut off from water access.” She emphasized that lawyers can and should provide assistance by “taking cues” from individuals who are rooted in the community and committed to “thinking about a range of solutions outside of the law.”

Before getting involved in community lawyering, Alexander argues, it’s important to have a theory of how social change is achieved—this, she said, “is crucial to developing strategy.” Alexander asks her students at Michigan to think critically about their values, how they will measure success, and what theory of change they believe in before getting involved with local organizations.

According to Alexander, lawyers’ skills and knowledge gives them a privileged position within community organizing spaces, but lawyers’ impulse to overthink potential pitfalls to strategies can end up limiting community leaders’ ambitions: “Lawyers are very good at framing things that are winnable, but not transformative,” she said.

To Alexander, it is important for lawyers in a community organizing space to sit back and listen to how community leaders want to tackle the problems. This, she argued, can also prevent community members from becoming dependent on lawyers and can “build a power base of knowledge within the group,” an essential step in advocating for change. Community-based lawyering also requires building sustained relationships and “getting involved for the long haul.”

These values are central to the Law for Black Lives network, which seeks to democratize access to legal knowledge. In Alexander’s words, this means “taking legal jargon and making it understandable.”

Building on the international nature of the Human Rights Workshop, Alexander also stressed the importance of looking outside the United States for guidance and inspiration. “There’s a huge amount we can learn from groups all over the world who are putting their bodies on the line and working to achieve to social change,” she said.

To close her talk, Alexander noted the importance of intersectionality in movement-lawyering. “In the Black Lives Matter movement,” she said, “we knew we had to focus on the liberation of black people, women, and LGBTQ folks, to have an intersectional, anti-racist focus.”