An Equal Place

Abstract

Abstract This book is about the role of lawyers in the movement to challenge economic inequality in one of America’s most unequal cities: Los Angeles. Covering a transformative period of city history—from the 1992 riots to the 2008 recession—the book examines how law has been used, and what it has achieved, in the struggle to make Los Angeles a more equal place. The backdrop is the dramatic growth of low-wage work powered by global outsourcing, declining unionism, increasing labor contingency, and surging immigration. The book’s narrative focus is on five pivotal campaigns in which lawyers allied with the city’s dynamic labor, immigrant rights, and environmental movements mobilize law to transform key sectors of the regional economy. These campaigns, analyzed through in-depth case studies, reveal how law has shaped low-wage work in Los Angeles—and at times provided a potent weapon to contest it. Drawing upon archival research, extensive interviews with key actors, and a review of court files, this book explores the role of lawyers in defining the city as a space for redefining work. Challenging critical accounts of lawyers in social movements, its central claim is that by advancing an innovative model of legal mobilization, the L.A. campaigns have achieved meaningful regulatory reform, while strengthening the position of workers in the field of local politics. Through multidimensional advocacy to promote worker organizing, lawyers and activists have succeeded in converting policy change into greater interest group power—forging a new model of progressive city-building for the twenty-first century.

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