Scott L. Cummings. “Mobilisation Lawyering: Community Economic Development In The Figueroa Corridor.” In Cause Lawyers and Social Movements. Edited by Austin Sarat and Stuart Scheingold, pp. 302–335. Stanford, CA: Stanford Law and Politics, 2006.
This article explores the emergence of Community Economic Development (CED) as a distinct form of cause lawyering, characterized by transactional collaboration between community nonprofits, public funders, and private investors to promote neighborhood revitalization within the post-regulatory state. Unlike traditional cause lawyers who focus on legal rights and systemic reform, CED lawyers mobilize community participation to create innovative institutional structures aimed at local economic improvement. While CED fosters ongoing community involvement through partnerships with government and business elites, it often limits adversarial political action and reinforces existing power frameworks. However, the rise of the “accountable development” movement in Los Angeles challenges this collaborative model by using confrontational community-labor coalitions to secure benefits for low-income neighborhoods from publicly subsidized developers. Through a case study of this movement, this article reevaluates the relationship between cause lawyering and community mobilization, highlighting both the continuities and shifts from traditional CED practices toward more adversarial and politically engaged lawyering.