Digging into Democracy: Reflections on CED and Social Change Lawyering After #OWS

Barbara Bezdek

Imagine your city free of poverty, racism, violence. Now consider, how does the law you teach or practice bring that vision closer to reality? I ask myself this question, in response to a key flexion point in Professor Haber’s article, CED After #OWS, which urges Community Economic Development (“CED”) lawyers to assess how tame the social justice dimension of much CED law practice has become in the decades since its rebellious origins in the 1960s and 1970s era of civil rights and antiwar activism. Does CED practice hew so closely to establishment legal institutions that it impedes the transformative social justice aspirations of the communities in which we work?

In this Essay, I consider the tensions set up between ‘being the change’ in the prefigurative sense that the Occupy Wall Street (“#OWS”) movement activism popularized, and Haber extols; and ‘building the change,’ a common rationale for much community-led CED practice that is criticized as small- ball and insufficiently impactful both locally and on the scale of social justice imperatives addressed by social movement activism. CED After #OWS suggests that now is the time to move on from aiding people in establishing their own community-led, community-benefiting alternative institutions to mediate the structures that impoverish and imperil their neighborhoods, in favor of more frankly politically conscious and activist “anti-authoritarian community counter-institutions.”