A few years ago @j_simonson, @sameer_ashar, and I wrote a series of blog posts about the need for left legalism & politics rooted in grassroots social movements @LPEblog @LPE_Project -- to our great surprise we heard many found it useful. So we decided there was more there.

For the last year we met & read work old/new, ours/others, to understand a tradition of legal scholars ideating with social movements (e.g., Derrick Bell). Not from on high but alongside.  Not to tear down but to build. We tried to sketch a theory, a framework, an entry point.

This work, that centers social change as a grassroots project, and identifies modes of scholarly production in solidarity with a capacious and radical collective project, is increasingly important now, in the era of elite rule & defund the police, cancel student debt, land back.

In Movement Law, we make the case for scholarship in solidarity with social movements & grassroots resistance/rebellion, modes of organization, campaigns, and demands. For democracy rather than status quo elite rule. For our collective survival & dignity.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3735538

We ID 4 moves for such work -- 1. ID strategies & tactics of grassroots resistance; 2. studying those strategies/tactics; 3. shifting our epistemes towards that resistance; 4. adopting a posture of solidarity. We name scholars that do each of these in ways that inspire.

Scholars are not central to projects of transformation. Often we undermine them, we coopt, we sell out, we hold fiercely onto things as they are, defend the sinking ship. How do we move in ways that build momentum around a radical imagination of redistributing power & resources?

The paper is a sort of love letter to traditions of scholarly and intellectual resistance, a call for refusal of status quo modes of intellectual production & for more love & more fight in all that we do. For the planet and for each other.

The brilliant @meganfrancis said it might be useful to ppl in other disciplines -- to those in law and beyond, we are eager to hear what you think, and for recommendations on who else we should read and cite, and think with in this & future works, on method & substance.

Here we cite mostly to legal scholarship because we are making a disciplinary intervention -- but we aspire to be part of a larger community of people trying to think and organize around/against the status quo, and for a more full and free future.

Of course the heart of the paper is about all that we have and can learn from working alongside social movements, organizers, and directly impacted people engaged in projects of survival and transformation. From Mariame Kaba to Fannie Lou Hamer to UFW to SNCC.