Ascanio Piomelli, “The Challenge of Democratic Lawyering,” Fordham Law Review, vol. 77, no. 6 (2009): 1383-1408.
In implementing their robust vision of democracy and confronting neoliberalism, these democratic lawyers also challenge key individualistic, aristocratic, and formalistic pillars of mainstream U.S. culture and lawyers’ professional socialization. In fundamental ways, these lawyers and their partners see and act differently than their mainstream peers (not just in the corporate and private bar, but in the “public interest” bar as well). Their ideas and practices challenge reigning cultural and professional understandings and practices-about who we are and how we are constituted as a society, economy, and polity; about who acts and who follows, who matters and who doesn’t, and which sorts of knowledge should be cultivated and heeded; about how justice and change are properly measured and most successfully pursued; and about what lawyers do and with whom they do it. At heart, these democratic lawyers believe-as much of the rest of U.S. society and the bar do not-that ordinary people, acting collectively with peers, receptive professionals, and other allies, can and must play a leading role in efforts to reshape our society and political economy.