Legal Expertise and Skills That Made a Big Difference: Some Case Studies

Following are excerpts from “Louder Than Words: Lawyers, Communities,

and the Struggle for Justice,” a report by the Rockefeller Foundation that shows innovative strategies adopted by civil-rights lawyers in recent years.

Mobilizing Sweatshop Workers to Fight for Themselves

On August 2, 1995, 71 Thai garment workers in El Monte, Calif., were found enslaved behind barbed wire, watched by armed guards in an illegal sweatshop. For seven years, scores of immigrant workers had been imprisoned in this compound, forced to sew clothing under the labels of some of the largest and most well-known U.S. garment manufacturers and retailers. The El Monte prisoners labored virtually round the clock for negligible compensation, and were subjected to ceaseless mental and physical cruelty. The notorious practices discovered in the El Monte slave shop generated enormous public outrage and media coverage.

Several public-interest organizations, including the Asian Pacific American Legal Center of Southern California, had identified sweatshops as a serious civil rights issue. The El Monte raid provided an opening for effective organizing and advocacy, not just on behalf of the formerly enslaved workers, but for all abused garment workers in this country. By joining together, the workers and these groups have provided momentum toward a larger movement against the exploitation of workers. …

As the organization in charge of legal advocacy, APALC never wavered in its commitment first to help the formerly enslaved Thai workers gain control over their lives and their own advocacy efforts. At the same time, APALC formed alliances across racial lines by including Latina workers and attacked the structural inequities within the garment industry. …

APALC also employed novel legal strategies. It developed an innovative interpretation of a federal statute to obtain visas for the workers, and it brought a groundbreaking lawsuit against the operators of the sweatshop and the manufacturers and retailers who profited from the labor of those who were enslaved.

In both its litigation and non-litigation work, APALC designed its efforts to involve the workers themselves, so that they became increasingly educated about the process and empowered to make future decisions on their own. The workers attended monthly meetings for more than three years where they both discussed and participated in ongoing litigation and received life-skills training.

APALC’s legal advocacy on behalf of the workers was highly successful and is likely to translate into broad-based improvements in the lives of garment workers throughout this troubled industry. APALC’s landmark legal claims, in combination with extraordinary media coverage and public pressure, enabled the workers to get legal settlements of more than $4-million in compensation for injuries.

Prior to the settlements, APALC also won key motions that established a major new legal precedent. Previously, garment workers had limited redress from the sweatshop operators, many of whom are fly-by-night operators who can quickly close down or in other ways make themselves immune to legal sanctions. By establishing the grounds to hold larger manufacturers and retailers liable for sweatshop abuses, the lawsuit creates incentives for manufacturers and retailers to ensure that their products are manufactured under lawful conditions in the future.

‘Good Fortune, Good Practice’

When a major research university obtained city approval to turn one of the remaining parcels of open space in Boston’s Chinatown into a multistory parking lot, residents sprang into action. Years of hostile land-use decisions by city officials had already blighted the neighborhood with numerous highway arteries and a red-light district. …

Using creative legal strategies supplemented by protests, media campaigns, neighborhood coalition building, and strategic alliances with powerful environmental groups, a disenfranchised immigrant community with limited English was able to stop the parking-lot project and win back use of the space. A community complex will soon be constructed on the site. …

Community activists and residents formed the “Coalition to Protect Parcel C for Chinatown.” It was comprised of 21 community groups and hundreds of individuals. The coalition’s short-term goal was to defeat the garage proposal at all costs. Its long-term goal was to democratize community decision making. …

Drawing upon lessons from previous struggles, the coalition created six task-oriented committees and a steering committee. Chinatown residents and organizational representatives sat on the steering committee.

It developed four main strategies for the Parcel C struggle: 1) persuade hospital and city officials to withdraw the garage proposal; 2) organize the community to support any necessary legal action; 3) alert potential supporters within and outside Chinatown about the Parcel C fight; and 4) develop alternate plans for Parcel C. …

The success of Parcel C as a community movement and as a demonstration of good community-based lawyering grew out of a synergy of good fortune and good practice. It took place when the community was ready to fight and when a group of energetic, young, daring, and committed lawyers, law students, and activists were eager to assist.

The effectiveness of the struggle hinged on a combination of community empowerment, relationship building between lawyers and community, and opening communication between languages and cultures. These components paved the way for a pragmatic attainment of community goals. The lawyers were able to use the tremendous strengths of the community, utilize new areas of law, and tap the resources within the legal services program. In the process, they also helped train law students to become the next generation of community lawyers.

Changing Patterns in College Admissions

When affirmative action was effectively banned in Texas college admissions [as part of a court decision known as Hopwood], three Texas lawyers teamed up with a coalition of academics and activists and forged a powerful idea to reward hard work and success in high school and use the segregation of Texas high schools to promote racial diversity in admission to the state’s flagship universities.

Their idea, the Ten Percent Plan, guarantees a seat at the flagship Texas public colleges and universities to all students from all high schools in the state who graduate in the top 10 percent of their class. In the process, it gives exceptional students of color, even from the most segregated and underfunded high schools, the opportunity for the kind of college education that historically has been denied them. In addition, the Ten Percent Plan reintroduces the potential for racial diversity at Texas flagship universities. And it may inspire community groups through out Texas, now that their local high schools can field students for those elite universities, to take new interest in how these powerful institutions operate. …

While the first year’s results were disappointing, the second year returned Latino and African-American freshman admissions to the pre-Hopwood percentages at UT/Austin. At A&M, minority admissions increased but not back to the 1996 levels.

The Ten Percent Plan has rather quickly achieved its “triage” goal.

It not only halted the decline in minority admissions. It brought the numbers back up. That alone makes it laudable as an example of creative, transactional lawyering. Even more, the Ten Percent Plan’s advocates accomplished this goal in a manner that paves the way for more fundamental transformation.

The Ten Percent Plan illustrates the power and the possibilities of remedies that consider race as a lens on broader unfairness. … The Texas Legislature’s response to Hopwood is one of the first and most promising examples of how a rollback in affirmative action can serve as the “miner’s canary,” alerting society to the ways traditional admission programs can be exclusionary for many qualified students.