Reformulating Our Inquiries, Repositioning Our Failures: Law and Lawyers in Campaigns for Justice

How does law matter for social justice and equality?What impacts do lawyers working on behalf of and alongside low-income workers have on social movements?Robust debates among law-and-society scholars have attempted to answer these questions as they investigated the legacies of the civil rights movement.Why, for example, despite legal wins like Brown v. Board of Education and the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, have racialized economic inequality and subordination persisted in the United States? 1 Some scholars focused on the efficacy, or inefficacy, of litigation in relationship to social movements (McCann 1992;Keck 2009).They looked at judicial action on behalf of disadvantaged groups and found several limitations (Scheingold 1974;Rosenberg 2008).An adjacent debate focused not on litigation but, instead, on the specific role of lawyers in social movements (Bell 1976; Sarat and Scheingold 2006).In his over two decades of scholarship, Scott Cummings has entered both conversations and pushed those of us who take up these questions to sharpen our theoretical analysis (Cummings and Eagly 2001;Cummings 2013 Cummings , 2018)).Bringing together these inquiries for a new generation of lawyers and social movement actors, Cumming's work has helped theorize what law and those who specialize in the law in the neoliberal era do for, and in fights for, economic justice.In An Equal Place: Lawyers in the Struggle for Los Angeles, Cummings (2021) has brought together a decade of qualitative research examining five campaigns in the