On April 13, Lawyering for Liberation: Lessons from the Field marked the publication of Professor Marbré Stahly-Butts‘ new book Lawyering for Liberation: A Toolbox for Movement Lawyers, co-authored and co-edited with Ameca Reali.
The event brought together movement lawyers and organizers on the frontline of social movements including Vince Warren, Joo-Hyun Kang, Rachel Herzing, and Meena Jagannath, each of whom contributed chapters. Together they discussed how lawyers and legal workers can strengthen social movements through radical, movement-centered advocacy and power-building.
Professor Stahly-Butts reflected that “we wrote the book for moments like this when it is painfully clear that the law alone will not save us. Sustainable and effective change only comes when communities most impacted organize and demand better. It is the job of movement lawyers to stand with these communities and use the law, when effective, to help them shift power.”
This conversation is one Stahly-Butts has been shaping for years. A co-founder and former Executive Director of Law for Black Lives, she was also a chief architect of the Vision for Black Lives Policy Platform and a co-founder of the National Bail Out Collective. Before joining the CUNY Law faculty, she worked as Deputy Director of Racial Justice at the Center for Popular Democracy as a Soros Justice Fellow, where her work focused on organizing with families affected by aggressive policing and criminal justice policy in New York City. She holds a B.A. in African American History and Human Rights from Columbia University, a master’s in African studies from Oxford, and a J.D. from Yale Law School, where she worked with the Bronx Defenders, the Equal Justice Initiative, and the Prison Policy Initiative.
That formation across academic training, direct organizing, and legal infrastructure work is visible in the book’s architecture. Lawyering for Liberation is structured not around doctrine but around practice: how to enter a movement relationship, how to think about theories of change, how to avoid the pitfalls that have caused movement lawyering to go wrong, and how to use legal tools in the service of campaigns led by organizers rather than attorneys. It is, in that sense, a distillation of everything Stahly-Butts has built and learned outside the classroom, now legible and teachable inside it.
The publication arrives at a moment when the questions the book addresses, about the relationship between legal strategy and political power, between winning cases and winning change, have taken on new urgency. For students at CUNY Law, many of whom will spend their careers at exactly that intersection, it is both a resource and an argument: that the skills they are building here are most powerful when they are placed in service of something larger than any single case.