public impact litigation Forum

[Anonymous User]

Is anyone interested in public impact litigation? I know there are a lot of public interest law firms that do this - rather than taking on individual cases for indigent clients, like community service law organizations, their goal is more to take on cases that promote the cause they are working toward. For example, ACLU taking on cases that combat sexual discrimination. So it seems less about the specific client's situation, and more about promoting a cause.

So my question is - for those who are interested in this type of litigation, can you share some insight on why you want to do this type of work, why it is more important to you as opposed to working as a PD or something? What made you decide to pursue this career path?

Also, how do you even draw the line between the interests of the specific client's situation vs. the overall cause? Aren't they essentially the same? The specific situation is encompassed in the overall cause, so why does a distinction need to be made? Since the specific situation is a subset of the overall cause, fighting for the specific situation automatically promotes the overall cause. So what is the underlying difference between litigation for the client and "impact litigation"?

Going back to the ACLU example, why is there even a difference between a low income community law service representing a sexual harassment victim and the ACLU doing "impact litigation" against sexual harassment? Fighting for justice for the specific victim is inherently promoting the cause against sexual harassment, so it seems like the two types of litigation promote the same interests. So I am a bit confused on why there is considered to be a separation between the two.

I always hear the argument for other types of PI (PD stuff, low income representation, etc) but I want to hear the argument for this type of work too.

[Anonymous User]

I do labor law on behalf of unions and workers, and I purposefully sought out work that was part of a movement advancing a larger cause.

In law school, our public interest careers coordinator had previously worked for a string of community services nonprofits, and talked about the difficulty of not really being able to solve her clients' problems or the issues in the community, like a game of whack-a-mole where you attack one issue but then another rears its head. Even now, a lot of my PD friends complain that it's like a revolving door, and they get a lot of repeat clients and sometimes struggle with feeling like they can't change anything. They are a totally necessary part of the fight, but I kind of knew from my work before law school (special programs in underfunded schools) that I wasn't really cut out for that consistent emotional drain without being part of something aimed at larger change. And I do really love that about my job. Part of workers coming together in unions to bargain against the employer is that, by organizing as a collective, they have more power than they would in a one-on-one negotiation with the employer, so supporting that structure for bargaining and democracy in the workplace helps address the structure of unequal bargaining power, and so I really like being part of the movement that helps advance that larger cause.

You ask whether the interests of the individual and the interests of the overall cause are mostly the same, so that advancing the interests of the individual achieves the larger goal. That's sometimes true, but there's a lot of times when it doesn't quite work that way. For instance, the ACLU had to choose from a bunch of plaintiffs when it picked Edie Windsor, and it turned down plaintiffs it didn't think would be sympathetic enough to the judges or plaintiffs who didn't fit the right image. Edie Windsor was a cute little white woman with just the right amount of money that the judges understood the impact of the issue. In the example you give, the ACLU might not pick the low income sexual harassment victim if the case wasn't a good vehicle for addressing a particular part of the law they wanted to change. Or looking at the Equal Justice Initiative doing work against the death penalty -- they have to approach the issue piecemeal. And so sometimes that means saying that the death penalty is okay except for people with mental disabilities or except for juveniles or except for people who didn't commit murder. And clients who don't fit that description kinda get thrown under the bus in the name of pragmatism and moving the cause forward.

The converse is that the low income community services clinic doesn't necessarily have the resources for the bigger fights that involve changing the law up at the appellate level / that public defenders don't take on these bigger fights about the death penalty to the Supreme Court, and that's not really their goal or what they're trying to accomplish in any given case anyway so they might use an argument that will help their client but may or may not hinge on this greater theory that's gonna change the law.

[Anonymous User]

I do labor law on behalf of unions and workers, and I purposefully sought out work that was part of a movement advancing a larger cause.

In law school, our public interest careers coordinator had previously worked for a string of community services nonprofits, and talked about the difficulty of not really being able to solve her clients' problems or the issues in the community, like a game of whack-a-mole where you attack one issue but then another rears its head. Even now, a lot of my PD friends complain that it's like a revolving door, and they get a lot of repeat clients and sometimes struggle with feeling like they can't change anything. They are a totally necessary part of the fight, but I kind of knew from my work before law school (special programs in underfunded schools) that I wasn't really cut out for that consistent emotional drain without being part of something aimed at larger change. And I do really love that about my job. Part of workers coming together in unions to bargain against the employer is that, by organizing as a collective, they have more power than they would in a one-on-one negotiation with the employer, so supporting that structure for bargaining and democracy in the workplace helps address the structure of unequal bargaining power, and so I really like being part of the movement that helps advance that larger cause.

You ask whether the interests of the individual and the interests of the overall cause are mostly the same, so that advancing the interests of the individual achieves the larger goal. That's sometimes true, but there's a lot of times when it doesn't quite work that way. For instance, the ACLU had to choose from a bunch of plaintiffs when it picked Edie Windsor, and it turned down plaintiffs it didn't think would be sympathetic enough to the judges or plaintiffs who didn't fit the right image. Edie Windsor was a cute little white woman with just the right amount of money that the judges understood the impact of the issue. In the example you give, the ACLU might not pick the low income sexual harassment victim if the case wasn't a good vehicle for addressing a particular part of the law they wanted to change. Or looking at the Equal Justice Initiative doing work against the death penalty -- they have to approach the issue piecemeal. And so sometimes that means saying that the death penalty is okay except for people with mental disabilities or except for juveniles or except for people who didn't commit murder. And clients who don't fit that description kinda get thrown under the bus in the name of pragmatism and moving the cause forward.

The converse is that the low income community services clinic doesn't necessarily have the resources for the bigger fights that involve changing the law up at the appellate level / that public defenders don't take on these bigger fights about the death penalty to the Supreme Court, and that's not really their goal or what they're trying to accomplish in any given case anyway so they might use an argument that will help their client but may or may not hinge on this greater theory that's gonna change the law.

IMHO ACLU are limousine liberals who don't want to be bothered with the day-to-day plight of average people. Look at this list of things the NY ACLU refuses to take. Basically anything having to do with the little man. https://www.nyclu.org/en/about/legal-as ... ot_address

The community law offices do help with such things and I've been meaning to observe one in person one day.

I've thought about what would happen if you just up and opened up an office in a ghetto and took all clients, accepting whatever they could pay. But it's never been more than a thought.

Refreshing to have such a discussion on TLS, which seems to focused on the compensation of biglaw (how ironic it will be when they see what they've gotten themselves into) and which is devoid of any high-minded conversations about justice and helping the weak.

[lavarman84]

IMHO ACLU are limousine liberals who don't want to be bothered with the day-to-day plight of average people. Look at this list of things the NY ACLU refuses to take. Basically anything having to do with the little man. https://www.nyclu.org/en/about/legal-as ... ot_address

Bad opinion

[nixy]

IMHO ACLU are limousine liberals who don't want to be bothered with the day-to-day plight of average people. Look at this list of things the NY ACLU refuses to take. Basically anything having to do with the little man. https://www.nyclu.org/en/about/legal-as ... ot_address

Bad opinion

Yeah, I agree, that's a terrible opinion. For instance, the ACLU does tons of stuff about prisoners writ large. It does tons of stuff addressing policies about undocumented immigrants. That has plenty to do with the little man. They're basically just saying that they don't represent individuals, and while that's obviously one way of helping the little man, it's not the only way at all.

[nixy]

Also, how do you even draw the line between the interests of the specific client's situation vs. the overall cause? Aren't they essentially the same? The specific situation is encompassed in the overall cause, so why does a distinction need to be made? Since the specific situation is a subset of the overall cause, fighting for the specific situation automatically promotes the overall cause. So what is the underlying difference between litigation for the client and "impact litigation"?

Going back to the ACLU example, why is there even a difference between a low income community law service representing a sexual harassment victim and the ACLU doing "impact litigation" against sexual harassment? Fighting for justice for the specific victim is inherently promoting the cause against sexual harassment, so it seems like the two types of litigation promote the same interests. So I am a bit confused on why there is considered to be a separation between the two.

Going back to this OP, I don't agree with the bolded at all. Take landlord-tenant law. If your cause is "take away landlords' unfair advantages under the law," representing one individual in a specific conflict with a specific landlord can help out that individual, but chances are good it won't change the law at all. So say a landlord evicts a tenant on bogus grounds because the landlord has more money and resources, or just has force on his side (e.g. can just hire people to come and dump the tenants' goods in the street or whatever). Representing the tenant in such a case would help the individual tenant, but wouldn't do anything to make landlord/tenant law fairer to tenants (it's probably already legally established that you can't evict your tenants without any basis). And the individual client may not even care about advancing tenants' rights, they just want not to be evicted.

However, in contrast, say that there is some kind of statutory ambiguity that landlords regularly exploit to evict tenants without any basis. A case that attacks/eliminates that ambiguity is going to advance the cause of tenants' rights in a way that just proving one landlord is a bad actor won't.

WRT to something like sexual harassment: representing an individual victim against an individual harasser doesn't necessarily have the same effect as, say, attacking the use of NDAs to prevent victims from being able to bring charges. Proving that one person harassed someone doesn't address, say, elements of the law that make it hard to bring a harassment case in the first place.

Basically, serving the interests of the individual *doesn't* automatically advance the law in a given area. Don't get me wrong, obviously working to help individuals is great, but it's just a different goal.

[Anonymous User]

I respectfully disagree with the idea that helping an individual accomplishes less then litigating some general rule. no good has been done until an actual real person receives some tangible benefit. It's only from those individual cases that you see the bigger problem, and by fighting for those individuals you will fix the bigger problem.

[nixy]

I respectfully disagree with the idea that helping an individual accomplishes less then litigating some general rule. no good has been done until an actual real person receives some tangible benefit. It's only from those individual cases that you see the bigger problem, and by fighting for those individuals you will fix the bigger problem.

I didn't say it accomplishes *less.* It accomplishes something different. You need to have both.

You seem to have a kind of naive view of how this all works. Have you gone to law school/worked as a lawyer yet?

(And to be clear, I'm not saying impact lit is the only worthwhile thing and you should rush off to do it rather than representing individuals. Of course we need people to represent individuals, probably more of them, and that's admirable. It just doesn't accomplish the same thing as impact lit.)

[Anonymous User]

I respectfully disagree with the idea that helping an individual accomplishes less then litigating some general rule. no good has been done until an actual real person receives some tangible benefit. It's only from those individual cases that you see the bigger problem, and by fighting for those individuals you will fix the bigger problem.

I didn't say it accomplishes *less.* It accomplishes something different. You need to have both.

You seem to have a kind of naive view of how this all works. Have you gone to law school/worked as a lawyer yet?

(And to be clear, I'm not saying impact lit is the only worthwhile thing and you should rush off to do it rather than representing individuals. Of course we need people to represent individuals, probably more of them, and that's admirable. It just doesn't accomplish the same thing as impact lit.)

I don't work in this area at all and only think about these things to, I don't know, feel good or something, but if you do and you have some anecdotes and knowledge to share please don't let me stop you from sharing.

[QContinuum]

I've thought about what would happen if you just up and opened up an office in a ghetto and took all clients, accepting whatever they could pay. But it's never been more than a thought.

There are plenty of law offices in the inner city. If you were to open up another one, you'd end up pretty much being a bog-standard general practitioner. I suppose you'd be the cheapest lawyer on the block, but you wouldn't last long ("whatever they could pay" pretty much invites folks to pay you nothing).

[Anonymous User]

IMHO ACLU are limousine liberals who don't want to be bothered with the day-to-day plight of average people. Look at this list of things the NY ACLU refuses to take. Basically anything having to do with the little man. https://www.nyclu.org/en/about/legal-as ... ot_address

Bad opinion

Yeah, I agree, that's a terrible opinion. For instance, the ACLU does tons of stuff about prisoners writ large. It does tons of stuff addressing policies about undocumented immigrants. That has plenty to do with the little man. They're basically just saying that they don't represent individuals, and while that's obviously one way of helping the little man, it's not the only way at all.

Piling on that it's a bad opinion.
I'm the second poster/labor lawyer, and by saying that sometimes individuals get denied representation because they don't advance the cause, I did not mean to imply that it was bad or because they didn't care. Like when I was at the NYCLU, they were litigating Hurrell Harring, which was a case that resulted in massive funding increases and caseload reductions for the public defender system in New York. https://www.nyclu.org/en/cases/hurrell- ... e-adequate So maybe they don't provide individual criminal defense, but they definitely do work that helps out the "little man" in a really meaningful way. And the people that work there work there because they care about that a lot.

[Civilservant]

I have had the opportunity to do "impact" litigation from the same position that I have offered typical legal services. The former is satisfying due to the pure legal arguments that are typically made, it is what a lot of law students envisioned practice to be. The latter is a mix of facts and law, a lot more finesse, a lot of dealing with practical issues. They can both be stimulating. There are certainly non profits that do nothing but pure legal issues, but there are opportunities in the legal services arena to get a flavor for both. The mixed role will often give you less time to work on the pure legal issues, and you will have fewer resources, but sometimes it is the creative argument that wins the day.