AN EQUAL PLACE

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.