Lifetimes of Commitment to Law and Social Justice
Jacqueline A. Kinghan
This chapter draws upon the leading work Lifetimes of Commitment by Molly Andrews. It connects the themes of the text to social justice lawyering and argues that it has the potential to shape and inform our understandings of how lawyering identity and values are sustained over time. Andrews has long challenged the notion that a commitment to political activism is limited to youthful idealism. This chapter therefore explores the work upon which this challenge rests and raises questions about how lawyers experience their social identity at law school and beyond, also suggesting ways in which social justice values might be sustained. I take an autobiographical approach and outline my own engagement with the themes of the text and its potential connection to legal education. In doing so, I consider the likely implications of Lifetimes of Commitment for the next generation of social justice lawyers and argue that an interdisciplinary legal and sociological approach to social justice education will facilitate a better understanding of lawyering identity in the future. I am extremely grateful to Molly Andrews for participating in an insightful, in-depth interview about her work, which I draw upon in my analysis.
[Tjhis is the story of a group of people who despite, or perhaps because of, their advanced years, still feel the urgency of social justice. It is this which has always inspired them and which still continues to fill them with a sense of purpose. These are lives of commitment.
When I first read Lifetimes of Commitment, it stirred in me a memory' of my own pathway to law. Here was a text about a lifelong commitment to social justice: about believing that such commitment might exist outside the confines of youthful idealism and the importance of simply pausing and listening to the stories of experienced, tenacious advocates for social justice. On reading it I was taken back to the offices of a traditional commercial law firm in central Edinburgh in the summer of 2003. I was entering my last year of law school and had been assigned a mentor by the university as part of a scheme to promote access to the legal profession. My mentor was a senior partner in the firm, and as part of the mentorship programme, I completed a period of work experience at his firm that summer. The atmosphere in the office was often tense and strained; my mentor could easily become angry and be heard shouting at his paralegals and secretaries. There were a few of us who didn’t want to seem ungrateful for the opportunity but were struggling to find it meaningful, and the experience generally served to confirm my desire not to become a commercial lawyer. At the end of the placement when my mentor asked me about my future career plans, I said I wanted to pursue a master’s in criminal justice and human rights. To this day I remember him slowly leaning over to tap my head while shaking his own, lamenting that he too had been interested in social justice when he was my age. He told me about the challenges and pressures of the real world and about growing older and wiser. He said I would come to my senses.
I can look back now and see that it must have been difficult for my mentor to resist entwining my intended life path with the history of his own. I know too from my research and work with lawyers in law centres, charities, and NGOs over many years that careers in legal aid and wider social justice legal practice do not come without considerable challenges and pressures. Nonetheless, in recent years I have been struck by the familiarity of this story for graduating law students and early career lawyers working in legal aid and wider social justice legal practice. Almost all of the young lawyers I talk to tell me about being repeatedly warned that going into legal aid work would be “career suicide and how even their law school lecturers and careers advisers expressed scepticism at their intentions, which often left them feeling isolated and alone. As Matthew Smerdon, CEO of the Legal Education Foundation and architect of the Justice First Fellowship Scheme, comments in this context: ‘there simply won’t be lawyers qualifying in the numbers that they used to. Where is the next generation of specialist lawyers going to come from?’
In this chapter I explore how the leading work Lifetimes of Commitment has the potential to shape and inform our understanding of how social justice lawyering identity and values might be sustained over time. Notwithstanding challenging circumstances and societal upheaval, Andrew's finds that the commitment of the activists in her study is maintained over many decades. First, I consider relevant socio-legal research in relation to the social justice values held by law' students in the early stages of their education. Second, I present Andrew's’ assertion, both in the text and in her subsequent work, that greater intergenerational exchange is needed in order to consider how law' students might meaningfully connect their present and future selves. Third, I argue that the extent to which we create opportunities for students to glimpse a version of their future lawyering selves in the experiential learning opportunities we create might help embed what Andrews calls a ‘habit of responding’ to injustice. In my analysis, I draw upon the original text and subsequent work, as well as an in-depth interview' with Molly Andrews about its ongoing relevance some 25 years after it was written.
Lifetimes of Commitment
In Lifetimes of Commitment Andrew's closely follows the life stories of a group of 15 British men and women, aged between 70 and 90 at the time, who had all
Lifetimes of Commitment to Law and Social Justice 9 dedicated 50 years or more to pursuing social justice. The causes they worked on were rich and varied - from local housing rights and involvement in trade unions to the international anti-apartheid movement - yet all the participants in Andrews’ study are bound by a shared narrative of a commitment to social change. Their lives can be characterised by both ‘belief and action’, and Andrews finds that participants have a strong and well-developed consciousness of the extent to which these are interrelated. The participants are variously involved in local and national action groups, membership organisations, demonstrations, protests, and wider advocacy. With respect to action, many of the participants clearly express that their group membership gives them ‘strength’ through a shared commitment to particular social justice causes.
Andrews rests her study in the field of political psychology and challenges the “society-individual dialetic” by drawing attention to social reconstructions of knowledge within their historical, social, and political context. Her concern is not so much why people turn to activism in the first place or even the different tools they use to achieve their goals, but rather why they might understand and respond to their environments in the way that they do. Through meticulous narrative analysis, Andrews conveys how participants rely on their collective experience to situate their individual values and motivations within a wider context. She describes the involvement of one participant, Frida, as follows:
In the language of social identity, she wants to locate herself in a group. However, she connects this personal experience to a political one, implicitly asserting that the existence of a big movement adds legitimacy to the cause; simultaneously, it augments one’s perception that one’s commitment is the ‘right thing’.
Many of the participants, Andrews notes, “experience themselves as members of a community to which they feel responsible”. This perception of themselves lasts over many years, indeed decades, and is closely woven into their personal and family lives. The participants present a strong affiliation to others within their groups and believe they can make a difference through a goal-orientated course of action. As Hepworth observes, ‘Andrews argues that political commitment has deep-seated consequences for the individual’s conception of the self and its relationship to the external world’. As such, a lifelong commitment to social justice may involve leaving individual notions of character and selfhood behind as, together with others, meaningful group identities are created. This demonstrates the value of group identity over time, as well as connections between the past and the present. In this sense, the ‘wider message of the study is that positive aging cannot take place in a privatised individual vacuum but necessarily requires group support’.
Participants in the study stay on course: their commitment remains “constant but dynamic amidst the changing political tides of history. It is clear that they derive a sense of meaning and purpose in their lives from their political commitments. Their experiences, as well as the connections made in the text betweensocial identity and social justice, are potentially insightful when considering the challenges ahead for the next generation of law students, social justice lawyers, and educators.
Social Identity and Social Justice
The relationship between social identity and social justice is relatively underexplored in legal education in the UK but has been developed in other jurisdictions. While personal identity refers to one’s own self-identification linked to personal values and attributes, social identity refers to self-identification in terms of group categorisation. What do we know about a law student’s selfidentification and group interaction, including experiential learning, at law school? The socio-legal research that addresses whether group experiences at law school might incentivise a commitment to social justice presents somewhat mixed findings. Sandefur and Selbin remind us that socialisation studies in the US context generally “tell a story of decline and diversion” where during law school a ‘student’s commitment to work for the public good is either crushed or its meaning is changed to encompass more mainstream aspirations’. A dominant legal culture at law school can be overwhelming, as Erlanger and Stover’s work suggests, because if students fail to find refuge in a public interest subculture’ they are highly unlikely to leave law school with their ‘altruistic values intact”. Lopez writes in this context that ‘in many ways both current and past lawyers fighting for social change and all with whom they collaborate ... have had to face trying to learn how largely to overcome rather than to take advantage of law school experience’.
Even for engaged law students it can sometimes be difficult to access opportunities to work on social welfare or human rights projects and casework. While in-depth discussion is outside the remit of this chapter, there are of course also issues of equality and social mobility to consider in this context. Clinical legal education programmes might provide opportunities, yet the impact of this work in sustaining a commitment to social justice is not entirely clear. Sandefur and Seibin’s large scale study of early career researchers in the US found that there was no general connection between clinical legal education and a later commitment to pro bono work. However, for those students who came to law school hoping to improve society through the use of the law, Sandefur and Selbin determined that their experience of clinical legal education may have been a factor in “sustaining or accelerating” their original commitments. They also found a significant positive correlation between participating in law school clinics and later pursuing public service employment for those students who came to law school with civic motivations. Their findings clearly suggest that the effects of experiential learning in clinics will be more significant for some groups more than others. Nicolson and Newman’s subsequent comparative UK-US analysis of reflective journal writing by students also argues that ethical and altruistic values are enhanced by experience. Other US scholars have identified the importance of experiential learning for creating provocateurs for justice” and “justice readiness”.
Many of the studies in this field rest on principles of legal ethics, including altruism and citizenship. However, Andrews’ work has the potential to illuminate our understanding of students’ awareness - whether individually or collectively -of their social construction of who they are alongside the consideration of their actions and decision-making. For those students who come to law school with social justice values and who were already committed to those ends, as Sandefur and Selbin suggest, experiential learning opportunities might help sustain those values. Similarly, by drawing upon key themes in Lifetimes of Commitment we might learn more about the relationship between experience and developing identity at an important time in students’ lifecycles. This is especially the case for law students who self-identify as activists or become involved in activism during their time at law school.
My starting point is to consider the extent to which Andrews’ work might be relevant to our understanding of the social justice “self and to the creation of learning communities relevant to social justice legal practice. Andrews asserts that social identity is often a product of difference: that in choosing one version of self we reject other possible versions. To this extent, social group membership is ‘an integral part of the awakening of political consciousness, as it is the foundation upon which social contrasts are made’. As we develop an awareness of ourselves, we must inevitably do so in a way that is related to our continually growing awareness of other people. For students there may well be a myriad of factors at play in the processes of identity formation:
[Tjhe very complexity of the way in which individuals perceive their social and political environment, and where and how they place themselves within that structure, is crucial to the assessment of social identity.
Indeed, Andrews asserts the importance of an “experience of self where you can somehow be agentic”. This relates to the capacity for social change, which is of course critical to conceptions of social justice and refers to an ability to transform ideas and social structures over time. Andrews stresses the notion of an agentic self where one might begin to recognise oneself and others as agents of change in both an individual and collective sense. As such, any counter-narrative presented by others in opposition to this version of agentic selfhood (for example, as explored in my own brief story at the beginning of this chapter) may serve to deny rather than facilitate the possibility of the emergence of that self in future.
While somewhat distinct from Andrews’ work, we might draw parallels in this context to the wider scholarship in relation to social movements. The question of why some individuals stay involved in social movements and others withdraw has long intrigued social movement scholars. Emerging studies of cause lawyers also rest upon the importance of networked interactions and the ways in which lawyers - across different types and areas of legal practice - recognise one another and reach within and across boundaries in order to collectively pursue change. Structural and cultural factors are both relevant in this context, and, while acknowledging some recent contestation in the field, this remains the case regardless of the side of the political divide upon which those causes might rest. Passy and Guigni draw attention to the importance of “symbolic dimensions of activism” alongside social networks and also stress that sustained involvement rests upon both structural and cultural factors:
movement activists are more likely to remain deeply involved when their embeddedness in social networks and their perception of such embeddedness in relation to their life-spheres are coherently and consistently interconnected.
More recent studies confirm Andrews’ observations and demonstrate that for activists to remain committed to social movements they need to not only be embedded in social networks relevant to issues of importance but also keep “a symbolic linkage between their activism and their personal life-spheres”. The relevant literature identifies other factors impacting upon the involvement in social movements such as efficacy, available resources, and opportunities; however, where networked participation and personal engagement become separated, it appears less likely that activism will be sustained over time. As such, it is important to consider the structural and cultural processes at play in maintaining a commitment to issues relevant to social justice activism.
Intergenerational Exchange and Social Justice
The ability to therefore, firstly, glimpse one’s agentic self and, secondly, to become embedded in networks that facilitate participation and engagement might play a role in allowing students to pursue and sustain social justice legal practice. In considering possibilities for engagement Andrews urges us to move beyond traditional boundaries in which we have become so entrenched. For example, over the last 25 years, she has developed the themes explored in Lifetimes of Commitment to consider further the dynamics of aging as well as the “narrative complexity of successful aging”. She argues that our tendency to over-rcly on compartmentali-sation” of the life cycle into stages means that we limit the potential for meaningful intergenerational exchange. As she describes, such exchanges are ‘after all the ligaments of connection between the world which we have been born into and that which we will one day leave behind’. Our current selves all too often look to our future older selves as somehow detached from who we are in the present. Likewise, the dominant culture distances aging as something much less admirable, and subsequently meaningful, than youth. Andrews notes in this context that:
The language of success and failure, and of measurable outcomes, seems to bypass the very quality that lies at the heart of aging well - a sense that the journey is worthwhile, and that the challenges with which one has been faced have been met while keeping one’s dignity intact.
Andrews is clear that we too often neglect how aging involves a continuing life of meaning, even though that meaning - or the construction and presentation of it - may change over time. While arguably complex, she stresses the importance of personal narratives in order to transcend compartmentalised notions of aging. Andrews stresses that “when people understand that aging is not just about others, but about themselves” such boundaries will begin to disappear.
In considering the limitations of imposed boundaries, Andrews also explores the related compartmentalisation of self in our consideration of singular aspects of one another’s lives. Importantly, Andrews argues for a multiplicity of identity. As she describes, the various aspects of one’s identity - race, class, gender, and so on - are not easily distinguished from one another, and we must pursue an “integrative analysis”. From an educational perspective this also relates to our need to embrace interdisciplinary approaches to law and social justice:
If you’re trying to understand people’s lives it’s hard to say I’m only interested in this bit or that bit. We live our lives as interdisciplinary beings and I think it’s really problematic that we are so loathe to bring different areas into conversations with each other.
Andrews urges us to therefore foster experience across multiple boundaries, and her work rests in the social-psychological realm of seeking to better understand motivation and shared values. A commitment to intergenerational exchange may lead to a more sophisticated understanding of social justice values as well as the possibility of transcending other barriers, including those related to equality and diversity.
Within the context of legal education, this resonates with the experience of some clinical legal education scholars who highlight the importance of mentorship by role models as a source of learning in law school clinics. Nicolson and Newman describe how a process of “informal socialisation” takes place where values and prevailing norms are passed down from one generation to another”. Similarly, Andrews reminds us of the importance of simply sharing and listening to experience. As such, there are wide-ranging possibilities for an intergenerational exchange where historic voices can inform the present and the future, as well as fostering a glimpse of agentic selfhood for students and early career lawyers. Through, for example, experiential course provision, collective advocacy and campaigning, facilitating social justice mentorship opportunities, and continuing professional development linked to sharing best practices over time, we might better facilitate the continuity of experience that Andrews captures in her work. She also describes important influences: identifiable individuals, intellectual stimulus (books, films, etc.), and the role of highly visible organisations. These influences serve a catalytic function so that experiences do not rest in isolation but rather help transform those experiences into an understanding of what they might mean in their socio-political context. Such experiences, influences, and interactions might therefore help embed the next generation of lawyers in networks where they can consider their own work as a continuation of those who came before them, notwithstanding significant change and socio-political upheaval. As the moral philosopher Macmurray observed, an understanding of both individual and collective agency guides historical continuity:
History is not mere chronicle; it is understanding. Its fixed point of reference is the present; its effort is to exhibit the continuity of the past with the present and the present as continuing the past. But this past is a human past; its elements are the doings of agents.
Habits of Responding
The connections between the past, present, and future of social justice link to spiral learning, an educational theory that considers how we build and develop knowledge each time we encounter it. In the opportunities made available for students to respond to injustice - both formally and outside of the curriculum -there is potential for spiral learning. As one of the initial study participants commented about social progress itself: ‘You don’t come back, it isn’t that the wheel has come full circle. You come in a spiral. ... Life doesn’t go back to where it became, it comes up a bit further, and that’s where you see progress’. Many years after Lifetimes of Commitment was first written, Andrews reflected on her decision to exclude a model relevant to spiral learning, which she called the “habit of responding”:
The basic premise of the model is that identification as an activist happens over time, through an accumulation of political engagements, and that the more one not only allows themselves to see injustice, but, in conjunction with others, to seek to combat it, the more one is likely to do so again. Over time, this dynamic reproduces itself repeatedly, until ultimately it becomes embedded into a ‘habit of responding’.
The proposed model also connects to developing collective awareness of agen-tic selfhood: “I think the more people engage with a group, the more likely they are to engage another time”. As one of the participants in Andrews’ early study observed about his own involvement in activism, he perceived himself to be no longer a leaf being blown about in the wind”. Andrews therefore considers how continued involvement might lead to responsibility and solidarity, which are developed and sustained the more one engages and interacts with others. As she observed in Lifetimes of Commitment.
Responsibility is not something which is imposed upon one person by another or by a situation or even by an environment. It is, rather, something which is created by the existence of a situation which ignites in an individual (or group) a need or call to respond.
Another participant in Andrews’ initial study described the process of repeated responding becoming a “way of living”. Indeed, aging or changing paths to some extent in life did neither deter participants from their original motivation nor [strip] them of their perception of themselves as political activists”. Rather, their continued commitment to social justice is ‘a constant and fundamental expression
...of who they are, have been, and will be; it is the way they have come to live their lives’. Interestingly, Andrews observes in relation to her present research that when she talks to participants she interviewed many years ago and relates back what they said then, they each remark that they still share the beliefs and values they expressed in the past. There might be a considerable difference in the types of action they take. For example one participant who used to engage in demonstrations prefers now to engage in archival work on the same issues; however, the connection between belief and action remains the same because a habit of responding has been developed and maintained. In considering the philosophy of agency, Macmurray made similar observations on the relationship between agentic selfhood, action, and the formation of habit:
Nevertheless all action contains necessarily an element of reaction to stimulus without which it would be impossible. We call this habit; and the system of habits in an individual agent we call his character. ... They are formed in action and they are subject to deliberate modification and reformation.
Macmurray asserts that once habits have been formed, they then operate as an automatic, or a learned, response to stimuli. He also maintains that such habits support the development of one’s place in relation to others: ‘this means that we must think the world in which we act and of which we are constituents as a unity of intention’.
What does this mean for the relationship of law to social justice, and social justice to legal education? Firstly, the ways in which social justice lawyers respond to injustice are, on the one hand, clear from the legal tools they use, such as traditional legal casework and representation, strategic litigation, or wider policy work and campaigning. On the other hand, however, Andrews’ work reveals how we need to interrogate more closely the nuanced processes of habit formation and the cultural-political norms that frame those very responses. It is also instructive to consider what clinical legal education scholars refer to as the “disorientating moment” where law students begin to confront their prior conception of social reality and justice” next to the real issues they encounter, which is the beginning of real transformation” in terms of learning. Underpinning such learning are the processes of socialisation that help develop habitual responses. In this context, quoting Judith Shklar, John Calmore writes that only by understanding the face of injustice can we understand its counterpart, justice”.
Secondly, responses to injustice are of course influenced by social processes, including the presentation of oneself both in circles of legal professionalism and in other social and cultural spaces, including in the digital sphere. Andrews asserts that habits of responding should be “meaningful, conscious collective action, not a generic life style choice”. Where there are opportunities for action that require a thoughtful collective contribution, it is likely that habits of responding will be more meaningfully developed and might then be sustained. With increasing connectedness both nationally and internationally, there are many ways to engage in responses, together with others, while being mindful of the need for conscious” action. As Lifetimes of Commitment reveals, all situations, relationships, and networks have the potential to create opportunities for action where there is a shared understanding of social justice values.
Conclusion
Lifetimes of Commitment presents a rare insight into the ways in which social justice values might be sustained over time, as well as the important connections between action and belief. The text offers possibilities for young lawyers committed to social change and also for those of us tasked with teaching law students who are orientated toward that goal. Relevant socio-legal research highlights how a dominant professional legal culture can serve to quash student’s ideals and seemingly limit the possibilities of those who might come to the law with the aim of pursuing social justice legal practice. It is indeed regretful that many law students who wish to pursue social justice legal practice anecdotally reflect on a sense of isolation during their time at the law school, often exacerbated by the challenges and obstacles along the road to pursuing and maintaining careers in legal aid. Looking ahead in the UK context, the changing landscape for legal education and the growth of skills-based learning opportunities presents both opportunities and challenges. It is important that we do not continue to neglect the importance of social identity formation during these changing times. Further, against this background, Andrews reminds us of the possibilities for facilitating connection to the generations of lawyers and activists who came before in order to promote exchange and mentorship. This might offer a glimpse of a life in law and social justice in the future by way of contrast to the “career suicide” narrative so often presented to students by their educators and peers.
While intergenerational exchange holds the potential to overcome traditional boundaries in terms of our conceptions of aging, the legacy of Lifetimes of Commitment also rests upon its holistic narrative approach, which captures the richness of storytelling across disciplines. As a political psychologist, Andrews is mindful of the role of the law in achieving social change over time: “there’s a history there to be borrowed from”. Similarly, we might look outside of the law to the disciplines of political psychology and sociology to derive insights that help us better understand the experience of students committed to social justice goals. Developing an understanding of agentic selfhood that is habitually responsive over time is one way that might help us to support learning in a spiral sense. It can also create valuable connections between lawyers, activists, campaigners, and other actors in the social justice sphere.
Andrews recently drew attention to the fact that 25 years after Lifetimes of Commitment was written, studying lifelong commitment to social justice still remains “a neglected area of research”. In the book itself she described how social, political, and historical influences, which are so central to human development, are often overlooked in political psychology’. She commented further that: ‘behaviour which derives its very meaning from the context in which it exists or to which it is responding ... [is] portrayed as idiosyncratic and/or irrational’. It strikes me that the same could be said for the dominant view in legal education: that law students wanting to pursue social change are at risk of being viewed as idiosyncratic” or irrational” in their youth. Perhaps renewed attention to this field of study in the UK might serve to counter these assumptions in the culture in which law students learn. Lifetimes of Commitment certainly resonates with the scholarship of the leading civil rights lawyer John Calmore who observed that law students committed to social justice must question and challenge the dominant processes of legal professionalism and that a dramatic re-socialisation” is required. As Calmore observes: ‘[professional socialisation is not fixed, however, but continues throughout our professional lives, it is therefore possible to carve out norms, values, roles, and behaviors that are well suited to working to secure justice’. As a leading work in law and social justice, Lifetimes of Commitment offers possibilities for interdisciplinary research and teaching, as well as critical observations on social identity and social justice that might help shape the resocialisation processes of legal education in the future.
