Participatory Law Scholarship

Event Description

I will be presenting “Participatory Law Scholarship,” which is forthcoming in the Columbia Law Review: Drawing from the experience of co-authoring scholarship with two activists who were sentenced to life without parole over three decades ago, this paper outlines the theory and practice of “participatory law scholarship” (PLS). PLS is legal scholarship written in collaboration with authors who have no formal training in the law, but rather expertise in its function and dysfunction through lived experience. Building from the tradition of Critical Race Studies and an emerging body of movement law scholarship, PLS aims to press the boundaries of what legal scholarship traditionally looks like by evoking lived experience as evidence and developing legal meaning alongside social movements. Its methodology raises critical questions about how knowledge is produced and by whom, as well as what role legal academics should play in facilitating social change in the material world. The article also responds to skeptics who believe this approach abdicates a scholar’s “moral obligation” to truth, explaining why PLS is not just legitimate, but urgently needed to address the fissures and fault lines law has created.

Speaker:

Rachel López is an Associate Professor of Law at the Thomas R. Kline School of Law at Drexel University. Her research primarily focuses on state responsibility for mass atrocity, transitional justice, and the carceral state, with a particular focus on Eighth Amendment jurisprudence. This academic year, she is in residence at Princeton University as a Fellow in Law, Ethics, and Public Policy. She has also held visiting fellowships at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law at the University of Cambridge, the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights at Yale Law School, and the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law. In 2016, Professor López researched transitional justice in Guatemala and Spain as a Fulbright Scholar.