An authoritative look at how lawyers have successfully used a multilayered approach to effect social change.
An assessment of lawyers’ contributions to public service and social change in Los Angeles.
In this nonfiction book, Cummings describes in detail several advocacy and litigation projects undertaken by lawyers in Los Angeles from the 1990s through the 2010s. The title is a play on words, encompassing both the goal of making Los Angeles a place of equality for its residents as well as putting legal action on the same plane as politics in the quest for social justice. The book focuses on combating sweatshops in the garment industry, protecting the rights of day laborers to gather and solicit work, fighting for living-wage jobs, balancing the needs of big-box stores and local businesses, and dealing with the environmental and labor challenges of truck drivers in the local ports. Cummings writes about the lawyers involved in each project, the nonprofit organizations and community leaders they collaborated with, and the variety of strategies they pursued—litigation, mediation, community organizing, and legislation. Cummings analyzes the implications of each project in its own chapter and concludes with a wide-ranging assessment of successes, failures, and lessons learned along with an evaluation of how LA has changed as a result of the work done by the lawyers featured here.
Cummings, a law professor and author of Blue and Green: The Drive for Justice at America's Port(2018), traces the book’s origins to a public interest seminar he taught, and with its thematic organization, the book often feels like a class syllabus, with discrete components contributing to a cohesive overall product. Its narrow geographic focus allows for a comprehensive view of public interest activities without becoming unwieldy. The author presents his findings and analysis with a meticulous attention to documentation and detail—the list of abbreviations used in the text runs to four and a half pages, and the book’s backmatter includes 100-plus pages of notes; legal and political scholars will find it a useful, informative resource. The work is clearly aimed at a specialist audience, and while generalist readers will have no trouble with it—Cummings avoids jargon of all sorts and does an excellent job of making the law comprehensible to non-experts—the density and length do not make for light reading, and on occasion, the minutiae of lawsuits, appeals, and lawmaking can be overwhelming. For its narrow audience, however, the book is a well-written and thoughtful compilation of public interest law projects that have made demonstrable differences in the lives of Angelenos, like protected spaces for day laborers and improved conditions in garment factories. The chapter on day laborers is particularly well done, offering a comprehensive perspective on the interplay of legal and political solutions while situating the lawyers’ actions within the broader historical and cultural debates around immigration in California. The author offers a solid analysis of how effective public interest law has been in bringing about necessary changes, and the book’s conclusion provides both topics for consideration and concrete, actionable recommendations to other lawyers working on behalf of the public.
An authoritative look at how lawyers have successfully used a multilayered approach to effect social change.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-19-021592-7
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.
A wide-ranging critique of leftist politics as not being left enough.
Continuing his examination of progressive reform movements begun with The Cult of Smart, Marxist analyst deBoer takes on a left wing that, like all political movements, is subject to “the inertia of established systems.” The great moment for the left, he suggests, ought to have been the summer of 2020, when the murder of George Floyd and the accumulated crimes of Donald Trump should have led to more than a minor upheaval. In Minneapolis, he writes, first came the call from the city council to abolish the police, then make reforms, then cut the budget; the grace note was “an increase in funding to the very department it had recently set about to dissolve.” What happened? The author answers with the observation that it is largely those who can afford it who populate the ranks of the progressive movement, and they find other things to do after a while, even as those who stand to benefit most from progressive reform “lack the cultural capital and economic stability to have a presence in our national media and politics.” The resulting “elite capture” explains why the Democratic Party is so ineffectual in truly representing minority and working-class constituents. Dispirited, deBoer writes, “no great American revolution is coming in the early twenty-first century.” Accommodation to gradualism was once counted heresy among doctrinaire Marxists, but deBoer holds that it’s likely the only truly available path toward even small-scale gains. Meanwhile, he scourges nonprofits for diluting the tax base. It would be better, he argues, to tax those who can afford it rather than allowing deductible donations and “reducing the availability of public funds for public uses.” Usefully, the author also argues that identity politics centering on difference will never build a left movement, which instead must find common cause against conservatism and fascism.
Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781668016015
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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