While many young people become lawyers for the big bucks, others are
motivated by the pursuit of social justice, seeking to help people for
whom legal services are financially, socially, or politically
inaccessible. These progressive lawyers often bring a considerable
degree of idealism to their work, and many leave the field due to
insurmountable red tape and spiraling disillusionment. But what about
those who stay? And what do their clients think? Negotiating Justice
explores how progressive lawyers and their clients negotiate the
dissonance between personal idealism and the realities of a system that
doesn't often champion the rights of the poor.
Corey S. Shdaimah draws on over fifty interviews with urban legal
service lawyers and their clients to provide readers with a compelling
behind-the-scenes look at how different notions of practice can present
significant barriers for both clients and lawyers working with limited
resources, often within a legal system that many view as fundamentally
unequal or hostile. Through consideration of the central themes of
progressive lawyering--autonomy, collaboration, transformation, and
social change--Shdaimah presents a subtle and complex tableau of the
concessions both lawyers and clients often have to make as they navigate
the murky and resistant terrains of the legal system and their wider
pursuits of justice and power.
