Our Purpose & Strategy
Movement Law Lab brings the power of lawyers to social justice movements.
We transform the legal sector, training lawyers and legal organizations to go beyond winning cases to building collective power.
We build legal infrastructure for grassroots-led progressive movements.
We reimagine law, cultivating new ways to democratize, decolonize and deploy law.
Together with people’s movements, we organize lawyers into a force for human dignity, multi-racial democracy, and ecological harmony.
Movement Law Lab is responsive, collaborative, and future-focused. Our team of movement lawyers, organizers, and educators produces in-person and online gatherings, workshops, courses, and other resources. We enable emerging and experienced leaders to forge connections across issues, sectors, communities, and tactics to work alongside movements to provide immediate relief to people suffering under current systems — and to work towards long-term change.
We build
legal firepower
for social movements.
We are behind-the-scenes partners to coalitions seeking to build a bench of lawyers that can identify, triage, and respond to legal needs of individuals and organizations. We help develop a legal arm for social movements through deep consultation with organizers and grassroots groups to understand legal vulnerabilities and needs; recruiting and vetting lawyers to provide advice and strategy; and conducting outreach, training, and planning sessions for large groups of lawyers.
We train lawyers
to go beyond winning cases
to building power.
Our training and capacity building programs help legal organizations and lawyers develop the skills to work effectively with social movements and grassroots organizations. We’ve reached tens of thousands of community-based lawyers, legal workers and students, via online and in-person classes, internships and fellowships, symposiums, conferences; work with law schools; journals; social movement summits; and video series.
We bring movement lawyers together on the local, national, and transnational level to exchange knowledge, surface lessons, and work together. This cultivates relationships and increases capacity for innovation, creativity, and impact.
We connect movement lawyers
locally, regionally, and
across the globe.
We create
a future vision and
long-arc strategy for the law.
Transformation towards better societal systems requires changing the debates about what the role of lawyers and law is, what is legal, and what is just. In our upcoming Future of Law initiative, we bring together social movement visionaries across sectors and communities to dream and scheme how law can proactively and creatively be used to facilitate systems change, survive the violence of our existing political and economic systems, and build a new world.