A Brooklyn teenager taught herself legal concepts to fight religious discrimination alone
Evidence
If no one would help her, she reasoned, she would have to do it by herself. For months, she spent hours after school at the Brooklyn Public Library on Seventy-third Street, checking out law books and guides (And Justice for All: The Legal Rights of Young People, The Rights of Students: The ACLU Handbook for Young Americans, Teens on Trial: Young People Who Challenged the Law—and Changed Your Life, Sue the Bastards!: Everything You Need to Go to—or Stay Out of—Court, Law for Dummies, and others). She would bring them home and type up relevant portions, which is how she learned the basics of contracts and lawsuits and various legal concepts on religious accommodation and antidiscrimination. Whenever she felt she had a new argument, she would go talk again to the COSA after Leadership. As always, he listened to her carefully, never shutting her up or getting impatient with her, but he would always shoot her down, telling her that the point she had discovered didn’t apply to her situation or that she was falsely extrapolating from the law. Then he would send her packing. — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 382
Categorization
- SEED: Angle: self-taught legal literacy as a quiet resistance tactic — the reading list of public-library law books is itself a portrait of how ordinary people weaponize legal knowledge.
- XREF: Echoes the self-advocacy literature on ‘personally social justice’-era student activism and folk legal consciousness theories.