Northwestern University Fighting to Win: The Roles of Lawyering and Law Reform in Liberation Struggles May 13, 2021 >> JOANNA GRISINGER: Welcome everyone I am going go ahead and get started. I am Joanna Grisinger the director of legal studies and welcome to the annual law and motion talk. This is an interdisciplinary undergraduate program our students examine law, legal institutions and law reform by drawing on the methods and perspectives of the humanities and social sciences. Were delighted to have today is our 2021 law and motion speaker law professor lawyer and activist Dean Spade to talk about Fighting to Win the Roles of Lawyering professor Spade has built queer and trans liberation for the past two decades. His first book "Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law" released in 2011 with revised edition in 2015 of critique strategies organized around achieving legal productions for individual rights against state and private action. Enforceable through courts and the book points out how limited legal solutions really are. And it draws on the critical race theory and disability studies to mention a few to move away from achieving formal legal equality within a system of structural inequality and just, nation and develop politics that recognize and confronts that structural inequality and discrimination head on. Prof Spade Is the author of a recent book "Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next)" published by Verso Press last year. Prof. Spade We'll talk for about 45 minutes and then answer questions. I will read the questions aloud if you would submit them into the Q&A and we will answer as many as we can time permitting good with that I will turn it over to Prof. Spade. >> PROF. SPADE: Thank you for inviting me it is delightful to talk about these issues and social change but I am joining you from Seattle Washington, native lands and I will share some slides with you. What I really want to talk about along the theme is it tends to be pretty obscured in most schooling that we get. And -- including all the way through law school -- is the relationship between law and social change. And how we have thoughtful, critical, sober take on that. So that we can think about the role of lawyers and law reform in winning the battles that we have to fight right now. So there is this big myth that people in the US are fed through school and to the media and it comes out of the mouths of elected officials and everyone that the way change is made and that social change happens is through laws. That essential if you are part of a group suffering from various kinds of harm and intense material inequality you should try to change the law. And that story in the US is really grounded in an anti-black narrative that tells us that anti-black has been resolved by law. There was slavery, there was Jim Crow and US law fix those things and that the US now protects people against racism. In its laws. And that is at odds with the brutal realities of ongoing anti-black racism and state violence. That are pervasive that story about the US which is a super racist story is really central at lot reform is essential feature of that story. The reality that we live under white supremacy and colonialism are the founding and creating conditions of the US legal system and are where the US legal system maintains and is maintained by. And that's what law enforcement does. This is a key critical point that so rather than the lobbying the place that resolves injustice, which is the story the US tells about itself -- another key piece is that we have to face this painful reality that during the period when racism has become illegal in the US over the last 50, 60 years, we have seen worsening material inequality in the US. Extreme growth in the systems of racial state violence like border enforcement, imprisonment and policing, all while supposedly being told this has been taking care of them. As people interested in liberation that should make us suspicious. Critical race theorists talk about this idea that I find useful, preservation through transformation, the idea is that when people stand up and resist, brutal systemic conditions, the law will be changed just enough to preserve the status quo. To preserve as much as possible of justice and inequality. In the civil rights era, the US ends explicit formal legal apartheid but maintains the de facto apartheid that we live under now. We talk about schools that --they are more segregated than the time since Brown versus Board of Education. So the system changes what it says about itself but sometimes the outcome worsens. Another piece of this is that a lot of my students have not gotten a chance to study income to law school with living under the myth that is the top goal in this list. Another piece often people are not thinking about we are told to believe that when social movements when their wins are codified in law which would make it seem like law is the place of liberation. In reality law is primarily used to criticize social movement not support them. Some of the places in the decriminalization of movements for black liberation, movements against US settler colonialism, we can see this in the FBI's famous Cointelpro interventions to assassinate leaders of those movements and we can see it today. In the laws that are being passed right now to further criminalize protest and make it not a crime to run over protesters. All of these pieces, this is an ongoing cycle that we can see when the police are in the streets clearing out people's occupations and went police are in the streets tear gassing protesters that we seen the last year. His other related distortions that I want to name, we are told story about social change that centers the idea of charismatic leaders. One of the problems with this is that it hides the sheer numbers of people who make up a social movement and makes it seem like we just need a few really smart speech givers. As opposed to the fact that movements that have any success are made of huge numbers of people. There is also a distortion around , they want to be the one who saves their committee by winning which drives people to law school -- their want to say the community they are not part of. That framework -- is undignified of people who struggle in crisis. And then there's a broader elitism that I think underscores all of this that is the idea that social change will happen when elites, but the right solutions. So there's some kind of idea that poverty will be solved when someone graduates from Harvard business school with a right whatever or if we elect the right governor or president there is a sense that the answers will come from on high. Of course the universities that graduate those people in the structures of government whether we are talking about courts or legislatures, though structures are designed to sustain the extractive systems that we are trying to resist. Typical limits legal reforms that we see, a lot of legal reforms that appear to be wins for movements are solely symbolic either because they just say something like this state now says that discrimination against trans people is illegal but nothing changes in people's lives and there's no enforcement and the state continues to discriminate against those same people. There is a recognition of identity but there's no actual redistribution of housing, childcare, the basic things that people need. Most legal reforms had this problem. Kopp don't use those choke holds anymore, but they do it with Joe Colds or some other way. I might frame this as recognition and not a redistribution. many reforms legitimize the systems returned to tear down so the reform makes it seems like it has been taken care of or the University cares or police care or the elected official cares so it is like they are borrowing good PR from the struggles but not changing conditions on the ground. Some reforms are expanding the very systems we are trying to tear down so for example we've had decades of expanding police budgets in the name of addressing police violence. We will train the cops with the spirit we will hire cops of color, women cops, trans cops bid we will give them new additional less lethal weapons grade all of this has expanded that system. Another example which is relevant right now in the conversation about anti-Asian violence in the US is hate crime laws. These have been long debated for addressing many kinds of violence but hate crime laws are those that could -- passed supposedly to address the violence of the particular group by adding more punishment if you attack or hurt samadhi based on that identity. But actually they have no deterrent value. They do not stop people from doing those attacks. They just add more punishing power to the prosecutor and the same communities that are targeted are targeted by policemen so hate crime laws are just another weapon in the hands of racist, trans phobic, ableist antipoor system. A lot of legal reforms make some kind of distinction between those who are deserving and those undeserving. Like immigration relief but only for people who have not had contact with the criminal system. Or some kind of relief related to imprisonment but only if you have non- violent charges. Those kinds of distinctions reinforce the stigma against the most stigmatized people and actually sharpen the capacity of the system to do its harm because it divides the group also into lucrative political power together to resist and to those who will be cast as deserving and cast is undeserving and legitimizes the idea that deporting is okay if you say except for the special people. Legal reforms have a danger of de-mobilizing people --like someone's going to bring a lawsuit. the nonprofits will deal with that, the lawyers will deal with that. It can with people away from taking direct action in communities and from organizing on a grassroots level because the idea is that the elite solutions will be created by law and policy makers and advocates. A couple examples of this I was really disturbed when Donald Trump was first elected the ACLU website gave this impression like said like we are going to sue Donald Trump, there was this narrative that what we shall be doing -- should all be doing from this messaging is donating to the ACLU and plan parenthood and they would take care of it. So many people were newly mobilizable, angry and scared, and truth is you can use the legal system against Donald Trump. illegal, the US legal system is not going to undo the kind of white supremacist work that it is designed to support. Sorry to pick on the ACLU but I was upset by this at the same time period the ACLU launch this campaign encouraging people to take an oath online saying that they would protect the Constitution. And I was just like, this is the most, this is so de-mobilizing to take people who are desperate to do something and encourage them to do something utterly meaningless like just click something online that does nothing. And the Constitution, and it patriotic colonial narrative you could be like this document from God that will save and protect the spirit it is a document written by slaveowners and settlers. About establishing rules that work for them. And it is mostly done that. And so this just felt like this empty racist and colonial patriotic rhetoric that moves people away from actually finding ways to take direct action to protect each other from Trumps policies in their local communities. So if change doesn't happen by changing laws, how does change happen? The main thing is people power. Our opposition has all the money and guns and all we have is the fact that most people on earth are losing under the current systems. Most people's lives are getting more precarious, housing is more expensive, wages are lower, whether it is more disastrous. Healthcare for profit is killing us in numbers that are so obvious. So what we have is people power and the only thing that's ever made change in the past against elites. The only things that US law smiles bond will not lead to relief from the conditions we are facing. In fact, breaking laws is essential to our resistance movement and this matters because we live under a system of -- valuing peaceful protest and that story that says you are bad if you break the rules when you are protesting is about severely containing resistance. So we all have to resist that narrative and not characterize our own or anyone else's protest as peaceful or not peaceful and instead we have to show deep solidarity with people criminalized for resistance. The other key piece of how social change happens is by creating the ways we want the world to be not waiting to be for it to be delivered by elites. The capital System Works by, it makes us reliant on it for our needs to be met, we do not have a way to get energy in my house that is not coal and fracking org to get food that is not a by a destroying climate system, there's a dependency forced on us and if I don't go on these jobs and make these wages I will be left to die so I must participate in whether those things are harmful to me and others. If we want to live otherwise we have to create those systems, take back the ways in which her basic survival is owned by those systems. I will talk more about this soon but basically living another way, that ranges from people in the food sovereignty movement, working on changing food systems, people working on changing how we govern energy and whether local people can organize to have energy through different channels than what is provided by huge energy companies. It is about changing how we organize ourselves and our socialize so that we don't rely on police to deal with our conflicts. It is about creating systems that actually can sustain us. How do you do this, what is the strategy? There are three main types of work that this requires. One is actually dismantling all the stuff they've built out to control and kill us. So actually a lot of this these days looks like fighting back every time they tried to build a new jail, expand another prison, build new police station trying to get detention centers closed and prisons closed, that work is happening all over the country at local and state levels. So it means decriminalizing things and everything that takes cops out of schools and hops poodles that take out the ways in which the systems have been put into our lives. It also means direct support for people experiencing harm in these systems right now and mobilizing a lot more people to do that important work, most people enter social movements through mutual aid, through work or people are doing direct support either because I'm being evicted or going to the place where they're doing eviction subordinates mutual aid project and so I get there and they're like yes we will help you with yours and you want to be involved in justice? Or a lobular like all my God I'm so upset by what is happening and I went to help people which is this beautiful thing about humans that is where we go first. And that is out we end up in movements amadavat what is happening and I want to help others and I joined some mutual aid project and when I get there I learned a lot more than I knew because I meet people with different aspects and solidarity grows and hopefully we go into a life long commitment of social meaningful work. The direct support -- a lot of what this is about and what we are doing both of those ideally, it is world building. How do we grow the skills first collective self-determination co-stewardship of all the things we need and having care centered rather than extraction centered relationships. With each other, with the planet. This is like skills that we grow by being in groups together where we are making decisions together, sharing resources, and most of this work as I will talk about a little more, happens in unpaid social movement groups. Because once somebody is getting out wage and has a bosset is like we are not been creating social relations we are in the same business model that most nonprofits are in. So there are two main types of legal work a lot of people might imagine they might do when they go to law school. One is large-scale reform and the other is direct legal services. So first I will talk about large-scale reform work and how it tends to maintain the status quo great as I mentioned before, most large-scale reform work, like impact litigation cases, do not provide material relief to people. The harm does not reduce. The law says something new or the bill passes and the loss of something new but a lot of times not much changes. Sometimes you get relief but usually reaches just the least marginalized people within the group of people who were complaining about something. So it is just for the table who do not have a felony history or just for the people who are not undocumented or just for the people that can afford to go to college or whatever it is. It tends to tinker and not reach root causes. At worst it legitimizes -- I'm thinking about systems -- law suit out facing queer and trans people in the LA County jail led to the creation of a special queer and transection of the LA County jail, a new way to jail queer and trans people nothing that reduce the criminalization of queer and trans people and most of these reforms to divide people into deserving and undeserving. Legal services work paintings the status quo. I want to say about how legal services work in general. And how poor relief emerged. I think it is important to say, so poor relief --according to at least some Marxist welfare scholars, emerges as industrialization emerges in the US. I'm sorry about my barking dog. As -- as people are cleared off of land in order to make room, people have been doing systems agriculture for generations cleared off land to make room for increased grazing for new textiles industry that happened as new kinds of limbs are invented and you get a lot of people displaced, wandering the roads, totally lost from all their survival mechanisms they had for generations and those people are a threat. They are a threat to the rich people because they are wandering in hordes and are hungry and willing to come to people's houses and riot. Poor relief emerges as a way to control this people, creating a framework in which rich people and sometimes it was done through the city itself, it gives small amount of relief to people to keep them from rebelling and that was always heavily stigmatized and you had to go indoor come into the workhouse if you wanted to eat you had to go into basically this prison where you die. Even children. That is the margins of charity in the European model still prevalent in the US but some features of it, it is based on deserving and undeserving, it is stigmatizing and it is about trolling poor people and facilitating rich people and dominating and collecting wealth. Not trying to get rid of poverty it is trying to tamp down the possible uprising of the poor. Legal aid emerged in a similar way. Early 1900s New York City, huge numbers of immigrants coming from Europe and many of whom are coming with ideas about collective action and organizing and they are living in these terrible tenement apartments and working in these exploitive terrible factory conditions and they start to organize for change in the idea of legal aid is that it would be a way to assimilate these immigrants so instead of having them do collective action you would have them come and we would look at the cases one at a time. And evaluate their cases and bring them into the US legal system as they fight individually and if you fight individually you are much weaker than if you fight collectively. So like other forms of charity or poor relief was designed to facilitate poor people's needs but to manage and control their resistance and complaints. In the 1960s and 70s, we saw another expansion of legal services alongside an expansion of poor relief because there was a global movement against colonialism and white supremacy and movements against colonialism and white supremacy resulting in huge riots every summer. The unrest of the poor and particularly poor black people or Puerto Rican people, other poor people of color was upsetting to the federal government and the federal government put together a set of programs designed to help people in poor communities fight together welfare benefits that were being denied by the local welfare authority so it was the federal versus state governments and local governments for the point being legal services rather than giving these communities what they were asking for which was land, meaningful redistribution of wealth they instead gave people poor relief . And lawyers to fight it. That whole -- after that starting with Reagan in the 80s into the 90s that whole poor relief system was contracted and they --contract when--there are uprisings. In general, poor relief tends to individualized complaints. They do not organize with others to collective solutions for the problems, they just take the cases one at at time and are usually sorry we cannot take her case we cannot take her case, etc. we will just take one out of these many cases and just for the peoples cases were up most deserving and there is no root causes or collective action solution. This kind of work tends to de- mobilize and pacify Milton uprisings against poverty and racism. Lawyers also tend to have a problematic role in movements. Lawyers are often the people that deserve food is deserving and undeserving, I was a poverty lawyer. Sorry you don't have a case, you don't have enough background for the --you don't have a pathway to immigration, you are the one delivering the bad news about how the legal system has nothing for most people. Lawyers also tend to have this really horrible role of cutting deals that undermine movements. Because what happens is you will have a lot of unpaid people in grassroots groups making trouble and bring a lot of attention to something and then when the elites get really freaked out they don't connect with those people in those movements, they call the professionals who are often lawyers and nonprofits to sit at a table with the elites and strike a deal that usually results in those horrible reforms I talked about before. Where things are not going to change but it will look like the elites did something. And then lawyers and legal organizations as I mentioned are part of this process that de-mobilizes people by saying that lawsuits and policy efforts will make change. I think a big problem that lawyers have is we often believe too much in law despite the fact if we looked at the results of our own efforts, we would be more cautious in what the promises of that system operate law school should be called law enforcement school because it is --it is teaching you to only think about solutions that are possible within courtrooms or legislatures which means inevitably solutions that won't work for real liberation. I caution people against going to law school, law school is terrible and as a huge mental health impact on most people. It tends to highly isolate people like it is really hard to maintain other parts of your life while you go to law school and so when people are isolated it is easier for them to be indoctrinated so you're going to school during really hard schoolwork that is telling you the legal system is neutral and you have to always think like this and talk like this people lose their values. And their sense of how social change works and what is possible. The environment is very hostile to those that are not white, straight and wealthy and non-trans, etc. And so it takes a huge toll on them --everyone but particularly on people that are targets environment. The pedagogy is really conservative and most of what you learn is literally nothing to do with anything you would do as a --poverty lawyer -- in the social justice movement and it is at odds, and I think law school makes people into works people which doesn't help you'll when you try to be in social movements based on authentic relationships and collaboration. It is a professional list environment and it is toxic for people. And that encourages competition, leaders him and individualism. A big idea in law school is that law is neutral and one of the ways this is so clear is that law school see the framework of public interest law. If you say want to work for social justice they say you will be a public interest whereby that includes prosecutors and people that work for ICE alongside people who are like defenders getting people out of prison, the fact that law school can't even see a difference between people who want to walk people in cages and those who want to lock them out says everything about the belief neutrality of law, to go to law school already have this mis-direction where they believe going through systems is the way instead of ever opposing systems but law school reinforces that is the way to make a difference in the result is that a lot of people who care about liberation and then go to law school and up as sellouts, gatekeepers or police or other activists. You shouldn't do that, it is against the law or we should focus on the inside channel. In general in our movements I would say we have too many lawyers and not enough organizers we are not going to win our flights but suing or legislating. It is not that we never use those tactics and we can talk about using them in interesting ways but legal systems are the last place to codify whatever it is we are actually fighting for and they only do that when we built enormous grassroots pressure so it looks like where the action is but it is at the end of the action. It's just wrong to contain it. If people power is what makes change we need to mobilize a lot of people and lawyers rarely have that role. They're talking to legislators are fighting and administrative hearings,. It makes sense that a lot of people who want to make change want to go to a school because of the myths we have talked about I think it is a misdirection. And fundamentally organizations will not be leading tactics and strategies at best lawyers are technical helpers that do not get in the way of grass roots work. But there are technical things that lawyers can do but I went to the center lawyers from the way we've been linked to being saviors. I think it matters to most people that law school is super expensive and people end up doing whatever job they can get in our opposition is always hiring because they have all the money. To go to school because you want to do something about the criminal system and you end up processing misdemeanors. A lot of people I talked to that want to go to law school are like but my family had this problem were my friends have this problem or I had this problem and we couldn't find a lawyer to do this and so I want to go to law school so I can be the one who does it especially those who wish there were more layers to help people in prison who want to fight the next appeal but they are not entitled to free representation. The problem is that you are not the first person to think that Predate is not that because nobody ever went to school wanting to do that it is because there are no jobs doing that and so it's really this more complex thing were philanthropy --were funders are deciding what kinds of social movement work will be funded and of course they will fund things that are the least threatening to rich people because philanthropists are rich people. So whole segments that do not ever get funded it doesn't mean when you get out you will be able to do that for people who can't pay, how are you going to do that, where are you going to work. So I think there's a bigger question when there is not lawyers doing something important about why instead of just I am sure I will be able to do it. A big piece of this, to move away from seeing social justice work as career path -- it is a lifelong purpose doing mostly unpaid work. If you are getting paid it is probably because you are doing work that is not very threatening to the elites that are paying you, the government or the philanthropists who are all the same people. So I think it is an important point to move away from thinking that you will be paid for doing the most important work in your lifetime. I don't think it is realistic to think you are going to get trained to make radical change inside universities and law schools which of course are designed to make you into an automaton for capitalism and white supremacy. It does not mean you won't occasionally take a rad class, sometimes called things happen in an institution like that but we do not get our training from those spaces. You train in social movements by participating in them. I encourage people to pick a job because it is low hours or it is a good place to organize. Or because you enjoy it and then do your organizing for free because the most radical work happening on anything you care about is being done by unpaid people. In groups where nobody is paying them and that's where your accountability is to those groups, even if you have a job for nonprofits of the key question is just like any artist, musician, anyone in social movement work we are asking ourselves, how can I get by and do the work in a way that I want to instead of having my work shaped by who is paying me. What kind of work should we do instead of focusing on legal reforms? Getting involved in grassroots movements right now obviously pre-there's a lot of work to be involved in right away. Volunteer run organizations, I mentioned. And we all need to spend our lives making out how social change happens. Which means reading and studying about things people have tried in the past and things are trying elsewhere and in other issues, there is so much great stuff and podcasts and graphic novels about: resistance strategies. And becoming obsessed with the question of how to social change work and what are the oppositions moves and what was different than that now and why does that work there and not here and really doing that with friends and just taking account of how much information there is now and being practiced pretty it is import to de-professionalize legal work-- it would be amazing instead of all the people in your energy fighting to get that one housing lawyer to maybe take the case, we could instead train a lot of people do high-value work do not have to be lawyers if we are all supporting each other through welfare hearings, housing court and benefits applications, that would be a great mutual aid, that is a great approach to mutual aid. The Parole Prep project in New York is a great example. It is important that we work for free whether you went to law school or not. Because that's where the social movement work is at. I think we have to question that that is our value scale, who is going to be our boss. We have to work to dismantle legal systems and help people break unjust rules. A few final points. My recent work would popularize mutual aid, and it's part of all social movements that become powerful and win stuff and it's the work we do that provides people with serial support to survive existing systems, with an invitation to collective action. It is about what occult participation based on care and action --opposite that of the ACLU pledge, symbolic actions etc. it moves us out of that passive observer role and into active participation for creating a new world. Mutual aid work builds actual safety and well-being -- as opposed to hoping elites will deliver it and we are living through times of extreme crisis and for the rest of our lives we will be living through worsening crises as climate crisis worsens and the effects of the housing crisis, economic crisis and the for-profit health system and on going system of racist state violence, we need to have each other's backs and save each other's lives. Because no one else is coming to do it. The more that we already have those ways of collaborating and sharing and making decisions together in place the more prepared we are for the disasters that are coming. One final distinction because I mentioned before that history of poor relief and including social services and legal services is a celebration of rich people's generosity. It is PR for Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg the idea that rich people are thoughtful and --but it is designed to sustain the existing systems. Rich people will never pay for us to end their wealth. The chart always has that framework around saving, blaming and controlling for people oh, yes you might be eligible for housing if you can prove that you are sober and if you will take these psychological meds and you don't have a felony history and are undocumented it is all about intervening upon poor people as if poor people are poor because there is something wrong with them rather than something wrong with the system. Mutual aid says there is something wrong with the system if anyone is without what they need. This is just a summary, on the left and side of the charter some key values of the legal profession which is hierarchy, all organizations are usually in it typical hierarchy, white people and men at the top making decisions. The legal profession values individualism and Saviorism and values grandiosity and elitism making grand claims when we've --won things when very little is changed. And focusing on getting elite changes like courts --and --and legal organizations are mostly run on business model. On the right hand of the chart are -- when everyone --when we are not putting certain people on top and consensus and collectivism and self-determination. And a sense of humility like oh we try stuff and we evaluate it and admit when it is not working and suspicion of elite institutions and the solutions they offer. And a value on practicing on collectivist experimental models which I see intensely in social movement spaces these days. Here's a few resources at the end that I wanted to offer you better recommend people do deep study, I have my syllabi on my web site Dean Spade.net in case that is useful. It's non-academic writing which is digestible. I have a few podcasts that are detailed accounts of how activists do what they do in the bottom are two interesting inspirations if you are interested in learning about radical legal work. I will end there. And I am excited -- of this image, stop believing in authority, start believing in each other. I see people have put in a lot of questions and am excited to see what they are. >> JOANNA GRISINGER: Thank you so much, that was fantastic, we have a bunch of questions and I will put similar ones together. But I will start with a question -- the war on poverty sought include communities being provided assistance including through legal aid by requiring the community to be part of the leadership of community action agencies how does that fit into your discussion and would you consider the community engagement event that works with direct legal aid? Do you have any thoughts about that? I will combine that with a question about a similar question, is there some way for legal services themselves to be compatible with long-term change, or are the two mutually exclusive? And to add down to our a little of my own which is if you could speak a little about your involvement, the Rivera law project and doing that kind of poverty law and other kinds of direct legal aid? >> PROF. SPADE: I had to make a note. Tell me if I forget something. That was what I was talked about. So this great Society programs under Johnson what was happening at that time when there is this global and domestic uprising against white supremacy and there was so much rioting and people were fed up and really pushing back similar to what we sought last summer in the numbers of people not previously politically involved going into the streets with a clear analysis and burning shit which is usually what makes things happen --In Defensive Losing -- I Recommend That Both, It's a Great Book If You Want to Think Why Looting and Writing Has Made in Norma's Change in Society. In That Period the Federal Government Is on the Defensive and They're like Oh shit People are fed up. Lawyers and law professors, we really moved --we were moved by that period because a lot of that included lawyers working closely with organizers in the storefront legal services which we don't have that much now anymore but it was community based and part of what was happening there is a lot of state and welfare authorities have been excluding people of color and black people from welfare for years and the federal government wanted to provide relief to the horrible Converse contradiction that is been exposed --it is cheaper to do that and to actually give people what they are demanding which is reparations for slavery and land, work and power. I'm arguing that there or cold models at that time of lawyers working with grassroots legal services but the motivation of the federal government was to contain the struggle through giving out as little as it could and then it could be retracted and so then we saw the defunding of those legal services in the defunding of a lot of those welfare programs. So the argument I'm getting from the book Regulating the Poor --poor relief expands and contracts mostly to control the uprisings that result from the unending extractive systems and it's concentrated like it's never been concentrated read we can look at the legal services models and see what is cool about them and then say what I wonder why that is not happening now and why it is hard to fund that. Getting real about how that is not facilitated now -- my goal is not to get the government to fund that again because what it fought for was revocable and so that is a lesson learned from that time and I think legal services are essential but my question is not whether the way we are doing the works but if I was 19 think about law school. While I want to be a poverty lawyer because I grew up on welfare and this is what motivated me. I might ask myself if I go into a legal services organization to do legal services one at a time for the few people whose cases get accepted and I do that case over and over again and spend a lot of time delivering people bad news, I can help you because you're not the right person or you lost again which is what being a poverty lawyer is like is this the best use of my life in social movements? I founded --organization that does legal services and is trying to do it through an organizing model with the idea that if you enter here for services and it's for people of color and trans people that are prisons or healthcare, immigration or welfare proceedings, hoping the idea is you come here and you tried to get help and you organize with other people and other foster youth. And so we organized it in an atypical way of legal services and made it a collective and may there be non- staff people who are organizers in the group that are trained to bring more people entered It's an interesting experiment and still has some of the pitfalls of any nonprofit and it's hard to scale it for a lot of reasons. There's a ton of upkeep for having nonprofits you have this dependency relationship on funders and there is limited things that lawyers can do for people who are on the losing end of the law. So it's been almost 20 years of excrement I think it's been a powerful force in trans and queer movements that have left at four people and trans people and people of color and a powerful force within the trans communities given the state of the law. And I think --I want to see a bigger buildout of more and more groups doing direct legal support that is de-professionalized and doesn't focus on lawyers and realizing a lot of people having trouble with the law would actually get more out of the people power solution so when people go up or just at the employer's house it's not paying someone they get more out of that instead of going through a legal channel. We can stop an arrest and a deportation that we can't stop without legal system or when people unarrest people from copter break people from jail -- approaches must be far bolder and less legalistic --when people block environmental extraction programs losses can block that stuff. There's an amazing hacking that took down the Colonial pipeline -- I guess I just want us all to use our best skills in the best ways we can and I am worried that law --the myth about law direct peopled to make them think that can make them the most impact and I know lawyers are very unsatisfied with the impact they can make from those jobs. >> JOANNA GRISINGER: Another question at --do you think the Supreme Court in Bostock was beneficial in any real way, it was -- certainly touted in the near times and it's a significant case and expanding statutory protections from on -- on the basis of broadly was this beneficial port situations or changes the law on the face but not in practice. >> PROF. SPADE: Overall my work is been to question whether when we focus on the area that we call equality laws like antidiscrimination law, hate crime laws and questioning what that delivers pretty no racism has been illegal in United States for more than 50 years and racial inequality has worsened during that time or that ableism has been illegal for decades prayed I have lived in many states that had state laws that supposedly protect the trans people from this, nation. When been relentlessly contacted by trans people and been discriminated against by private entities and the state protect first moved to Washington I will never forget living there was a person that had been sentenced to drug treatment instead of prison and could not find a drug treatment center that would take them. They said the one take trans because it is too disruptive. And I said you guys pay these people and they are discriminated and breaking their own lot they said there's nothing we can do. I'm not saying that nobody ever gets anything out of antidiscrimination law about of general it is very very hard to win antidiscrimination cases and the people most likely to win are the most elite. Because I have a job as a law professor I have a lot of documentation of my work and evaluations but if I was being discriminated against being trans there would be hard to win but somebody working at McDonald's and trying to get hired at Rite Aid, and they were trans, no way you can never prove it. My work has been not about that those have been pointless or it's not that bad that that case happened but the amount of energy and money that's gone into making that kind of law the federal level for my entire life --especially the last 30 years if those same gay and lesbian rights organizations put their energy into joining the fight for Medicare for all or to decriminalize anything --but they haven't even though they would help queer and trans people they focused on equality law. Getting these laws that expand the criminal punishment system under the idea of hate crimes are getting access to military inclusion for queer and trans people so we can be part of the largest source of violence and pollution in the world that have jobs where we will be killed and sexually assaulted. But these pragmatic questions about social movement strategy that lead me to be worried about the overvaluedness of civil rights wins because we need to have a sober assessment of what it means when the government declares you equal. >> JOANNA GRISINGER: Several questions in here wondering if there's any counterexamples pushing back a little bit as legal from Re ever moved us in the right way? Are there certain things that law does better, formal legal approaches or litigation approaches might do better? one example, say the Innocence Project as a specific way of approaching a specific legal issue or maybe litigation is the only way at that point. And so is this a broader spectrum of places where we overvalued law more or overvalue less as I would phrase it? >> PROF. SPADE: Great question breed I'm not an absolutist on tactics. I would use them differently so rather than seeing them as legal tactics or tactics like I fought people for people to get their benefits. My topic is aimed at people thinking about going to law school. There's already a lot of people going to law school and about five jobs for that. We have enough lawyers. But there's a career path and a school for lawyers and not a career path for organizers. for example when we were fighting to stop the city of Seattle, the county from building a new youth gel be included a lawsuit with some environmental claims to slow it down to redo the grassroots fight. Lawsuit should be in the mix of what we can try --to lay our bodies and tie ourselves to the building equipment or petition --but we should do all the things that we should assess them and the point is just the overvaluing of legal reforms. It is useful to think of the Innocence Project example because it is it's an example of larger siding who is deserving and undeserving. When I saw Angela Davis speak in the 90s or member talk about how we needed to let go of the framework of innocence. Upper really going to oppose human caging we have to let go of the framework of innocence because the idea that everyone who is in prison belongs there except for the people that are innocent when in reality another being in prison is nothing to do with being harmful or dangerous. White people can drink champagne in the park but people of color can't drink 40s on the stoop. The same activities that people are not innocent of the police free in the world of white upper-class people. What would it look like a preacher to get everybody out with those resources? This is the move that abolitionists make, what are the strategies that will shrink the system and defund it will not be based on who is special enough to get out and that others deserve to be in. That is the message of the title of the project Innocence Project and it aligns with liberal beliefs in the United States and systems are fundamentally neutral with a few minor problems that we can fix. That is a fact that belief system is justifying all the genocides. >> JOANNA GRISINGER: The question here about whether you think the anti-critical race theory legislation that is being passed in states will be challenged in the courts and may be and many pieces of legislation going against critical race theory and whether law can be used in a useful way or if this broad social action or minimal social action leading to that legislation, what you would propose as an appropriate response or suggested response? But when we are living under a period of extreme right-wing insurgents, right-wing uprising in mobilization and fascism. On I'm putting a name of book that I recommend in the chat called The Antifascist Handbook. Gord Hill and indigenous comic book artist made a comment to go with it. It's helpful to read them together. There's a lot of disgusting right-wing nonsense in our legislatures it's so bad. I think that what the right way to fight is through mass mobilization, that is what I think it we can try to, there are people who are specialists in -- the world of lobbying in our states, that world, this professionalized world that has nothing to do with the people of the state. It is the small number of people who all have dinner together in the same peer group that fight over the little details of the bills. I'm always astounded how utterly limited that world is and then you've got these legislators who want to be known for passing anything. And then sometimes you've specialists from different groups --but only groups with big budgets have lobbyists so it is so undemocratic and the only thing that I think that shakes it up is larger scale organizing and people in the streets and that is when those people begin to take defensive action. It said there's a couple pieces to the people power piece. Holding more widespread participatory movements allows us to also develop better legislative strategy and figure out when it is to our end or just being played because mostly what happens in the state legislative strategies they call in the grass roots group and they get the stamp of approval on a bill that does nothing. When we have much deeper, bigger organizing, labor organizing, in my state we passed a law that's going to make a detention center close and it was led by a group that does not have any paid staff and as always been the abolitionist migrant justice group in the region and pushed all the nonprofits that do micro justice again and again because those groups don't want to make a bad compromise. That's a great example of that ecosystem. Also, our people have been illegal in a million ways a million times. It been criminalized at the question is what is the organizing we are going to do locally in the school so schools cannot actually even if the state passes some horrible anti-trans youth build the school refuses to do it or there's an alternative way to play sports or get healthcare, instead of trying to fix it in the government level when the right wing has so much of that power, what is the community response that would make sure that everybody had anything to do what they do. That to me is the stage we are at especially because we are in a moment where the government definitely cannot meet the crises we are facing weather fires floods or storms so the more organized we are if we are organized together in our community and doing abolitionist organizing and supporting bull in prisons and pushing back what's happening with COVID in prisons and doing all these projects and really networking with each other to court support for people and doing pop watch and all these pieces and in doing it we are learning feminist values and learning solidarity and more of us are finding out how to be trans allies and had to be allies people disabilities, that works prepares us for that response to every attempted onslaught by our opponents because we know each other and we know how to organize the thing and respond to it would not help people if they get displaced and we know how to help people coming out of prison. We need participation in a way that builds more than anything because we are in a crisis that includes this intense right-wing resurgence alongside also an intense left resurgence that I think is a lot of people participating in ways that they recently were not. So it is, we don't know what is going to happen, the only thing that is certain is the worsening conditions. Those are certain like the climate crisis is not going away. The problem of the US empire resulting in the growth of the security state, they are going to put their money into the military and the police while we all fight so hard to defund the police at the local level --and everything that plays out on these bills, that is up to us. >> JOANNA GRISINGER: Multiple questions from people thinking of going to law school do you regret having gone to law school? >> PROF. SPADE: That's a great question. I try not to get anything in my life but I no longer do work as a lawyer. I have a day job as a law press or which is a great job in barely having a boss not having to be there that often. The work that matters to me is unpaid. Most of them are on a solid path that lawyers happen to have. I enjoy teaching, I like it and it frees up a lot of my time. When I went to law school, there were few trans lawyers during trans legal work and there's a particular intervention I was able to make at that moment that I at there wasn't a lot of trans people there wasn't a lot of people in the queer trans world. And most of that work is centering on whether or not people can have their wedding cake decorated or whatever. If I could start my life over I probably would not go to law school and focused grassroots organizing sitting more things that would give me more skills around conflict mediation and movement groups. Like the bidding, these days I support decision-making, I would deeply study different models of collective decision-making and histories I would study the rise of the nationstate in the form in which people have resisted I would've gone deeper at think I also law school took a lot from my creativity. It fed into my insecurities it set me back and personal well-being that allows me to be bold and do what I believe in and work closely with others. What's done is one. >> JOANNA GRISINGER: That sounds like an answer to another question the legal profession is not help for creating social change what about legal education? Things that undergraduates would find more useful. >> PROF. SPADE: I would say you should not expect school to teach her how to change the world that is not what it is forbidden I had this amazing expense where went to this conference I met all these young people 17-20, they were trying to stop the mountain valley pipelines so they were all going in these trees and in a camp under the trees and the cop's would remove them and it was getting expensive for the pipeline to possibly continue. So many of them were trans and queer and they were learning all the deep things about collaborating together. What you really need to now -- whatever is happening in your town which is like everywhere there's a lot happening because there are crises everywhere so getting directly involved in mutual aid work and organizing around root causes that is the way to learn stuff. And if you go to school at the same time great but it is not as if most of your classes will have anything to do with that skill set because they're trying to teach her how to be a worker in capitalism and stay in line. Newspeak about how the battleground of struggle at Hadley cultivate justice struggles integrated into daily life? And for those who may already be tired, overworked and unable to add a march to their to do list for whatever reason what would you suggest? >> PROF. SPADE: I think it is important why we feel so tired and burned out. We live the most atomized and are more likely to live alone than anyone on earth at the basic level as we live alone our lives will be more expensive we all have to have every kind of full end plates and will have to have all the cooking and all the cleaning the labor sharing has been lost to us. So we work more and do the kinds of work people have been people have historically. And working more hours than for less money pit so one question is how do we make ourselves less tired by collectivized more and reducing our living expenses, I think those are questions many people ask. And I think that we are addicted to very exhausting entertainment. We live --in times, I tell my students they played six hours of video games after law school but I would be tired too. How do we assess whether the activities we are doing to unwind are actually restorative or not. A lot of us need help with that. Do I feel more present, open and connected after I do this activity or do I feel drained and numbed? I think that is a really big question. I also think that capitalism wants us to believe in a binary world in which you go to work and you get through it and you probably have to numb because you have a boss bossing you around. And as a reward you have consumption and numbing out. so the world is divided to work I have to do and play, things I have to consume food I'm trying to heal myself from that ideology because I noticed that I put social movement work into the work category and I would like oh--I'm going to this boring meeting. Having conversations with someone I don't really like but I love. Social movement work is ordinary, human needs work. When I had it in the work category I found it exhausting. I forgot that I chose it and wasn't getting paid for it. It was this habit living under capitalism and having to work to survive was poisoning. So part of the recovery from that is I am choosing this, would it be more pleasurable to go to the March with costumes and say I hate the police. Would it be more pleasurable, what is the set of things I can do or I feel purpose and creativity and if I felt those were restorative rather draining, I have to change -, that way being, that was programmed into me that was not my fault. That is leading to burnout and exhaustion. No matter what kinds of limitations we each have and what we can do and what our schedules are. There is social movement work to engage with Purdue can spend your time writing letters to prisoners would be amazing. Desal many things we can all do and it is not limited to marshes. They are rather limited single public display moment. Super habit things so it can make it so that none of our time is ours. >> JOANNA GRISINGER: One last big question in the chat. You make a strong case that social change of the law will be or often has been limited but I'm wondering whether there are social movements in your estimation that have been successful in seeking change outside the law. Can you talk about where and when in history should be look to see examples of the kind of change you are advocating for? But when I think that it is great to look at movements that organized a lot of people. Look at that 1960s and 70s and the number of people that were engaged, if you look at the black liberation groups happening then, that were doing mobile clinics, taking over part of a hospital. Doing a people's ambulance service, --what was happening in the Chicano movement, all of these, the feminist movement people giving themselves illegal abortions. I look at where people built a lot of capacity to meet each other's needs, what is hard now is if we look at that period and say wow that's inspiring work. So many of those people were assassinated and imprisoned in their movement went underground. Yeah, there was a backlash. Yes we have lived I am 43, my life is been a period of extreme anti-revolutionary times. So that can be sobering, there's a lot of people in my age range and younger are not believing change is possible or can't imagine it or think it is only love wins or something. There are times when people have met human resistance. Or co-opted and retracted. People do colonize their countries and a lot of those then cut re-colonize through global economic conditions that retained the extractive power in rich countries over poor people but there's so much about, look at when people took arms against their oppressors and also what went wrong, we have to study that. There has been a group that's been fully liberated, the struggles are ongoing. Long duration of colonialism/capitalism have a pretty intense stranglehold over our lives that we have no choice. One place of inspiration for me is the history of student strikes in Puerto Rico. Intense militancy. I'm also moved by, maybe some people follow this journal online, Perilous that follows prison uprisings--people do that. I've been moved obviously studying and seeing people take back land and build their own ways of being in their own municipalities and organized horizontally moved by the fight and the work to do that in anti-status ways of organizing, Peter Gelderless in a nonacademic scholar who often tells you a lot of examples of how people resisted and what they won and some are historical examples of some contemporary, those have helped a lot and also Cindy Milstein is another person who writes in that way and I recommend Naomi Klein, some of her writing that looks at how people are resisting extractive climate practices, all of that. Remember how to feel bold and see people taking risks together and I also loved the recent anthology, Standing with Standing Rock that really captures that struggle and a lot of what people were fighting for and how they did it and what they are up against. That story includes horrible police violence against people and the destruction and rating of the camps but I don't think they considered a failure. It is a significant success but an unfinished struggle. Which I guess they all are. >> JOANNA GRISINGER: Thank you so much and I hope everyone would join me and thanking Professor Dean Spade. And we can stick around for additional questions. In the remaining, we will stick around for about five more minutes if Jen has the time for that to ask questions but thank you so much this is fantastic. Excellent. if anybody is sticking around and wants to, you can -- we have the capacity to unmute you, I am just choosing not to unmute or let people talk but if anyone is sticking around it has specific questions and wants to do this in a slightly more informal way or sign off, I don't want have you consume your entire afternoon paid a lot of thank yous in the chat. This was fantastic, thank you so much but you must be exhausted can you talk for an hour and a half. >> PROF. SPADE: It is an honor to talk about my favorite ideas. . >> JOANNA GRISINGER: What do you teach in law school? >> PROF. SPADE: I teach legal ethics. I teach administrative law, those are the two classes that I teach and then I love to teach poverty law, law and social movements, once in a long while gender and law and once they let me teach grace and law. >> JOANNA GRISINGER: Excellent. Great comments in the chat, some people -- certainly, those of you still around, I'm happy to chat about a lot of these things in my constitutional law class. The advantages of going to law school and what it does to you -- it is absolutely true in terms of the advantages and disadvantages and what law school teaches you. Teaches you, in my law school we were not allowed to use the word fairness in making arguments, that was the F word -. >> PROF. SPADE: That says everything. >> JOANNA GRISINGER: It really does say everything. >> PROF. SPADE: We have a lot of questions in the Q&A, thank you for summarizing them. >> JOANNA GRISINGER: A lot of them were organized around similar projects. Some really great questions in here. >> PROF. SPADE: Hard message for people to hear. I know I am raining on parades and if you haven't heard it before, you can be just like well I am not going to listen to that because it is too complicated or doesn't give me this easy path. >> JOANNA GRISINGER: You hear so much on the other side. Do you have any suggestions for managing peer discomfort for someone who wants to be part of liberation? >> PROF. SPADE: Yes I think just like Mike a lot of that is emotional awareness, can I be uncomfortable and fearful and still take action and not act out on others? That is a lifelong struggle for everybody but particularly with people with privilege and how to feel the motivation before I say something and how to learn to listen and keep showing up even if it gets uncomfortable. I think there is just like, that is what courage is doing things even though you are afraid. We all can do some of that. If you're going to movement spaces and you are nervous and going with a friend, can help a lot of people. And coming back even if it is awkward the first time paid people are very human and so is easy to shop and have it not be as welcoming as it was her confusing. Dedicated enough to keep trying I think is really meaningful. >> JOANNA GRISINGER: Excellent. Anything else? Anyone else have any questions? All right, I will let you sign off until let everyone go by thank you so much again, this was a fantastic conversation. We were delighted to have you. >> PROF. SPADE: Thank you so much I'm really glad to be here hope I can collaborate again and connect with the students. >> JOANNA GRISINGER: Thank you so much. Goodbye everybody.