Tereso Casiano
Instructor: Van Hoy
LST 2010:001
10 December 2011
Legal Activism

In the legal profession, there are many people who become a lawyer not to get rich or to gain prestige, but who go into the law to make real changes. The practice of attempting to make changes to law through the courts is known as legal activism.
Activist lawyers generally are passionate about the causes they are fighting for. They believe that there is a fundamental right to make changes to the law and that society demands that they do this. Some would argue that this kind of activism can be likened to that of the religious fanatic who has no doubts about what God wants of him. They argue that the law is supposed to remain constant and unwavering and that inconsistency in the law is dangerous to society itself.
This paper will evaluate the above claims using examples of cases where activist lawyers have attempted to change a law that they believed needed to be changed and give examples of cases in which activism resulted in significant changes in not only the law as we knew it, but also society’s perception of right and wrong. Many lawyers believe that law was intended to remain constant and unwavering, and that any lawyer who tries to change the law is as dangerous as a religious fanatic. The difference between religious fanaticism and activist lawyers is that activist lawyers generally seek to reform the law in what they perceive to be an injustice to civil rights. Law students, upon entering law school This, however, is an extreme assertion. The legal system itself is supported by the state, which can be repressive toward its citizens. (Bonsignore, et al: 315) There have been cases where the consistency in the law has been more damaging to society. Activist lawyers serve a beneficial role in these circumstances.
In Thornton and Wife v. The Suffolk Manufacturing Company (1852) a married woman was unable to represent herself before the law. In the Supreme Court landmark case of case of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), it was ruled that segregation was constitutional as long as it was “separate but equal.” This made segregation legal in the south for almost sixty years. The problem was that separate facilities implied that
African-Americans somehow inferior to whites. It wasn’t until another almost sixty years later when the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which involved the desegregation of public schools in Topeka, Kansas that public facilities were made available to everyone, regardless of race. This case involved activism in which an activist lawyer sought to change the law as it was known. This lawyer’s name was Thurgood
Marshall, who fifteen years later would sit as a Justice on the United States Supreme
Court.
Here, legal activism was used to promote equality under the law and is supported by Section One of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States
Constitution, also known as the Equal Protection Clause, which states that no state can make of enforce any law that limits the privileges or immunities of American citizens, or deny them equal protection under the law.
What, then, was the danger in legal activism such as this? Is it more dangerous to let the law stand still and create tension between two groups of citizens. If an activist lawyer had not argued the case of Brown v. Board of Education, segregation may still be present in our law and our society would have suffered further as a result of racial inequality. In the landmark Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade(1973), activist lawyers, Linda Coffee and Sarah Weddington won women the right to choose whether or not to have an abortion and gave them rights over their bodies. Lawyers are intended to be advocate of those they are representing, and if their client is the people their jobs is to serve society as a whole, and to serve the will of the people and make changes to bad law according to the people’s will. In the past, activist lawyers have brought about many changes in society for the betterment of society as a whole; however, this kind of activism has been in decline. The legal profession is geared more now toward corporations and plaintiffs in lawsuit cases than toward individual rights. This could threaten the law’s objective to bring justice to society (Hadfield, 2000: 343).
It is important for a lawyers to remember that activism is what caused people to revolt against the crown, which resulted in the Revolutionary War, and ultimately,
American independence. Without activist lawyers, many of the liberties women and minorities enjoy today may have never come to be. If there aren’t those of us committed to devoting our lives to being advocates for change then democracy is only a charade.