Professor Jeena Shah on Movement Lawyering and Building Power Through Organizing

Jeena Shah knew she always wanted to fight for justice, but the concept of “justice” she learned about in law school stood in stark contrast to the operation of the “justice” system she witnessed growing up. Even when she was a recent immigrant to the United States, Jeena’s mother articulated to her the limitations of the country’s legal system to protect people from harm with greater clarity than any classroom discussion in law school ever had.

Immediately after graduating from NYU School of Law in 2007, Jeena worked with Dalit rights organization Navsarjan in Gujarat, India, continuing work she had started as a student in the International Human Rights Clinic and exploring the role of law in her ancestral homeland. She wanted to know if the law could actually work towards justice. After all, she had learned that India’s Constitution was written by a Dalit leader in the struggle to dismantle caste-based apartheid and was viewed as one of the most progressive in the world.

“One day, we were at a community meeting in a small rural town figuring out how our legal team could best support a Dalit community facing relentless caste-based oppression. I observed my boss, the fierce Dalit lawyer and activist Manjula Pradeep, center the community by listening to, supporting, and facilitating their goals. Over any clever legal strategy, Manjula prioritized the process that the community needed to go through—facilitated by a local organizer—to gain a sense of their own power to fight the conditions of their oppression. She saw the role of lawyers as merely supporting those efforts. This moment, and many others like it in small towns across Gujarat, entirely changed my view of the work of social justice lawyers.”

Working in India also taught Jeena how to navigate her own layered identities. Her experiences growing up in an immigrant community in New Jersey contrasted sharply with her experiences as the only non-Dalit person working at her organization. The work forced her to deeply reflect on her own family’s complicity in caste-based oppression; her family’s opportunity to immigrate to the U.S. was borne of some privilege, despite the financial struggles her parents had faced.

Years later, after Jeena had returned to the New York area and been initiated into the world of litigation work, she responded again to an urgent international human rights crisis. The 2010 earthquake in Haiti had devastated the land, but it was the man-made disaster of exploitative international relief efforts that called her to action.

 

Jeena traveled to Port-au-Prince to work at Bureau des Avocats Internationaux, a local law office, where she was supporting people displaced by the earthquake who were living in tent camps and facing evictions by alleged landowners. She found mentors like Manjula in the form of lawyer Mario Joseph and then-organizer, now lawyer Joseph Jacques Hebreux. They reinforced the primary role of community organizing over any value brought by lawyers, particularly in the context of international efforts and powers such as those of the United States that undermine the rule of law in Haiti.

Even after Bureau des Avocats Internationaux secured from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights “precautionary measures” exhorting the Government of Haiti to issue a moratorium on evictions until a resettlement plan was in place, evictions continued unabated. Jeena and her team turned to the axioms of organizing and advocacy, eschewing the top-down mechanisms of international human rights law and instead supporting grassroots strategies that leveraged the Inter-American Commission to bring the landowners to the negotiating table. In addition to forcing the landowners to use proper legal processes for any evictions, organizers were able to assert power at the table, even in the absence of lawyers, and at least temporarily slow the cycle of fighting evictions on a daily basis. These short-term adjustments built power and helped shift the dynamic between the unhoused and the purported landowners.

After she returned to the U.S., Jeena went to work for the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR). While she was there, the police killing of Michael Brown sparked the Ferguson uprising. Jeena supported her colleagues on the ground providing jail support, human rights documentation, and strategic planning. They also supported a group of Ferguson organizers who traveled to Geneva to testify to the United Nations about state repression of the uprising. With the world watching, the organizers returned to the United States and asserted the community’s demands in legislative spaces in Missouri and the White House.

“While I generally find human rights law to be worth as much as the paper it’s written on, seeing it used by community organizers to deploy what Derrick Bell describes as ‘interest-convergence’ surrounding the uprising was incredibly powerful. It evoked the strategies that Malcolm X had called for.” She continued to work with the then newly formed Movement for Black Lives in reporting to international bodies about the United States’ suppression of Black-led movements.”

 

Each of these moments—in Gujarat, Port-au-Prince, and Ferguson—along with many others over the course of her career, reinforced for Jeena that legal tools are most effective in fighting for social justice when used to build power in communities facing the brunt of systemic oppression. She learned that the law was best leveraged to fight oppression through what is often described as “movement lawyering.”

Jeena affirms movement lawyering that shares time and space with the communities one is supporting is essential. Where that has not been possible, earning a community’s trust has been challenging. She found her ideal role in those moments was in a support role for local lawyers and organizers grounded in their communities. Building trust with local lawyers and organizers was key, as it translated to trust from the communities they served. She notes that some lawyers struggle with developing relationships with local organizers when they feel there’s a power imbalance in the relationship.

“To me, wherever I am in the world, they’re just my colleagues and comrades. We share the same values, and we build our relationship through a shared commitment to the struggle for social justice. We build solidarity. You don’t need to put people on pedestals, paint them as heroes, or patronize them. No one has all the answers and recognizing that makes it easier for me to develop relationships.  Those relationships become my bridge to successfully supporting the communities they’re supporting.”

Jeena believes that when lawyers are unable to build relationships with organizers and communities that are authentic, beyond transactional, and able to withstand struggle, they often have trouble engaging in tough discussions about the collateral or long-term consequences of different strategies.

While Jeena was at CCR, she helped develop training programs that explored the theory of change underlying movement lawyering to guide lawyers in their overall approach to their work and their day-to-day decision-making. Later, in partnership with Law for Black Lives and Movement Law Lab, Jeena helped create the Movement Lawyering Boot Camp, aimed to help lawyers, law students, and legal workers explore a movement lawyering framework and gain tools to address challenges that arise in this work.

 

“We sought to help lawyers understand powerlessness as the root cause of oppression. Because the law is created by those in power, it serves to create and maintain this powerlessness, whereas organizing helps build power in oppressed communities.” Jeena recently described these principles in a Social Justice Lawyering Teach-In through Rutgers’ Center for Security, Race, and Rights during the summer of 2020 uprisings across the country.

She wishes she had learned about movement lawyering in law school, through explorations of the law’s relationship to power as well as the role of organizing in shifting power. Instead, for many movement lawyers, this understanding has solely come out of practice and study outside of law school. She disclosed this realization can be frustrating for students who spend time and money on a legal education that must in many ways be undone to understand and practice movement lawyering effectively.

While working as a visiting professor at Rutgers Law School, helping students explore movement learning in the Constitutional and International Human Rights Clinics, a position at CUNY Law opened. Jeena had long enjoyed working with CUNY Law alumni and often taught CUNY Law faculty’s scholarship in her classes. CUNY Law was where she knew she could teach students eager to learn the law to fight for social justice and work alongside colleagues who shared that commitment.

 

In her classroom, Jeena continues to facilitate the development of understanding the relationship between the law and oppression. She confirms that learning about the chasm between law and justice is a dynamic body of emergent knowledge in which she learns as much from her students as they learn from her.

“My students challenge me regularly! Every semester, they’ll ask me a question that forces me to have a deeper understanding of this chasm. Last year, I was teaching students how to use the 14th Amendment doctrine to challenge the anti-transgender bathroom bills popping up in different places. A non-binary student argued that because this doctrine assumes biological concepts of sex and gender binaries, our arguments still served to reify cisheteropatriarchy. In another instance, a student pointed out how the liberal justices’ discussion of individual rights supported ableist structures that were literally killing disabled persons. Both students pushed me to find resources to incorporate into the course to make these oppressive assumptions underlying discussions of 14^th doctrine plain to future law students.”

Jeena describes similar experiences in teaching her course on International Law, which focuses on the structures of international law that create and maintain oppression in communities across the world. Students, particularly those raised outside of the U.S., have helped her sharpen the course’s focus on neocolonialism and present-day structures of settler colonialism. She believes that students committed to social justice should explore the ongoing process of colonialism in all its forms and understand the role of international economic law, in particular, in undermining self-determination. For example, because international investment law has undermined democratic spaces worldwide, aspiring social justice lawyers should understand how international investment law operates.

“While you may care deeply about the human rights of a community displaced by an oil pipeline, you might also want to explore the investment agreement that forced the displacement. If we had more progressive lawyers in foreign policy spaces who are well-versed in the operation of international economic law, perhaps we could stop relying on human rights law and instead prevent the conditions that led to the human rights violations in the first place.”

In Pace International Law Review, Jeena’s article “UDHR: Our North Star for Global Social Justice or an Imperial and Settler-Colonial Tool to Limit our Conception of Freedom?” begins with bell hooks’ conception of freedom, which is described as “positive social equality that grants all humans the opportunity to shape their destinies in the most healthy and communally productive way.” Her closing statement to this article speaks to the core of movement lawyering and the mission she seeks to pass onto her students and comrades:

“By following the leadership of oppressed communities, movement lawyers seek to build another world where freedom—the type of freedom bell hooks describes—exists for all.”

To connect with Jeena, you can follow her on Twitter @jeenashahesq.