Join UCI Community Resilience Projects for a new seminar on law and social movements.

What: LAW 5681 Law and Social Movements: Race, Place & Climate Change

Who: UCI Law and graduate* students

When: Spring Semester 2019 (beginning January 9, 2019); Wednesdays, 3:45 – 5:45 pm

Where: UCI Law School, classroom TBA

Course Type: 2* Unit Seminar; Course Code 84373

Instructor: Abby Reyes, Director, UCI Community Resilience Projects   

Course Description

Transformative social movements generate shared understanding that the problems of climate change, racism and all social injustice, economic inequality, and our challenged democracy are connected. They also view the solutions as intertwined in ways that require strategic navigation. Movement Strategy Center defines strategic navigation as the capacity to generate collective direction and action in complexity and uncertainty. Strategic navigation becomes possible through audacious vision, deep embodiment, and radical connection.

Participants in this seminar will survey and examine the relationships between law and transformative social movements, both the actual collaborations between lawyers and groups of political activists, as well as the work of lawyers as political activists. The seminar brings the frameworks and practices of transformative social movements together with approaches to lawyering that protect, defend, and embolden movements for racial, social, and environmental justice, both here and abroad. The seminar then focuses on six living case studies of specific communities across the United States that view themselves as part of a “just transition” to community ownership and deep democracy for climate, racial, economic, and social justice. Seminar participants will gain an understanding of the gaps, challenges, and opportunities for stronger integration of movement organizers and movement lawyers in crafting a just transition.