On October 26, the Center for the Legal Profession co-hosted a small, informal conversation with the John and Terry Levin Center for Public Service and Public Interest Law that featured Scott Cummings, Robert Henigson Professor Legal Ethics at the UCLA School of Law.  Cummings discussed his work on the role of lawyers in seminal campaigns challenging economic inequality in Los Angeles, California, which he highlighted in his recently published book, “An Equal Place: Lawyers in the Struggle for Los Angeles”.

Diane Chin, Associate Dean for Public Service and Public Interest Law, introduced Professor Cummings by noting that he is well known for his teaching and writing on legal ethics, social justice lawyering, and movement lawyering.  She noted that the title of the book encapsulates Professor Cummings’ entire career: “seeking to create equal places with lawyers in the struggle for community.”

Professor Cummings began the conversation by paying homage to the late Professor Deborah Rhode and how she was such an important influence on his career and on this particular project.  He noted that the book could best be described as the history of legal mobilization in contemporary Los Angeles, while addressing broader themes around lawyering for social change and challenges to the labor movement.

Cummings provided some background on how he became a community development lawyer, having attended law school in the 1990s at a time when the critique of civil rights litigation as a mechanism for social change was salient. He opted to work with community organizations and local businesses that were engaged in economic empowerment in Los Angeles at a pivotal moment in the city’s history. Cummings’ experience ultimately became the basis for much of his teaching and scholarship, and the focus of this book.

Cummings explained that lawyers joined forces with local movements to improve conditions in low-wage industries — garment, day labor, retail, grocery, and trucking — transformed by deindustrialization, outsourcing, and immigration. He explained how sophisticated legal strategy — engaging yet extending beyond courts, in which lawyers were partners in social movements — was an indispensable part of the effort to make L.A. a more equal place and improve the well-being of low-wage workers.  Cummings offered these case studies as a particular vision of how lawyers can produce social change.