Legal help must build community capacity rather than substitute for community action.
Evidence
My struggle was to make them understand that they’re the ones who have to make everything happen. It was not him [the lawyer] who was going to be able to come in, it was not me who was going to be there to come and save them. I mean, we’re not coming in on a horse and here’s a knight in shining armor, coming in and saving the community. And I had prepared them for that. My whole thing was: it’s yours, it’s all of us, and it’s not having an attorney come in and he’s going to run and do everything for you, and so on. They knew that. But we also knew that we needed technical assistance, we needed the legal advice, we needed all these other things that the community didn’t have. — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up, 456
Categorization
- XREF: Directly relevant to eco-justice pedagogy and to the ‘law as one tool’ frame of ch8—models what community-lawyering looks like when it refuses saviorism. — connects to: Reliance on litigation atrophied the community group’s own organizing; Legal remedies consistently fail to aid communities in environmental justice struggles; Collective action rather than individual effort defines justice. (+2 more)
- DEFINE: Defines the empowerment model of EJ lawyering by contrast with the ‘knight in shining armor’ tradition.
Broader Connections
- Effective EJ organizing must reject savior-lawyer dynamics while still using legal help
#expands(0.92) - Reliance on litigation eroded the community’s own organizing capacity.
#exemplifies(0.88) — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up, 487 - Collective action rather than individual effort defines justice.
#corroborates(0.78)