Legalizing Community: Lawyers and Citizen Activism in Neighborhood Disputes

Clark University, Worcester MA

Investigators

Abstract

Citizen participation in and resistance to governance through community activism is a key aspect of contemporary urban politics, often expressed through neighborhood-based place identity. Community groups often organize around this identity through neighborhood disputes in which those groups may use law and lawyers to achieve their goals. While some accounts of community activists include references to legal tactics, few researchers have analyzed how groups strategize their use of the law or how lawyers interact with these groups in enacting their place-based concerns through legal strategy. Similarly, few studies have assessed how the dynamics of place-based disputing alter legal rules and processes or how lawyers respond to the complexity and richness of place-based activism. This research project will study cases of neighborhood activism against privately run group homes that provide treatment in residential settings to homeless and mentally ill individuals. Case studies of siting disputes in several jurisdictions will permit analysis of activism against group homes under legal regimes that regulate such disputes differently. The comparative context will permit assessment of how disparate legal strategies affect the interactions between activists and lawyers. Through interviews, archival research, and doctrinal analyses, the investigators will examine place-based discourse in siting disputes and the values embedded in that discourse as well as the cross-influence of those discourses with law, lawyers, and legal strategies. The project will demonstrate and delineate the mutual shaping that occurs when citizens engage the law to address community concerns. This project will add to the scholarship both of legal geography and of law by situating law and legal practice in analyses both of urban governance and of community discourse. It will describe the influence of legal professionals not only on the outcome of legal problems but also on the shape and content of client discourse. It will assess how place informs and is embedded in legal discourse and how legal rules and practices are structured and altered in response to place-based concerns. The project will aid policy-makers, lawyers, social service providers, and community groups in their efforts to mediate land-use conflicts and to realize less contentious resolutions. The project's delineation of how legalization and community self-definition interact will permit a fuller assessment of different legal regimes for regulating siting disputes. Finally, the project will assist legal educators in training new lawyers to integrate social and political influences into case strategy and practical judgment.