A cause lawyer, also known as a public interest lawyer or social lawyer, is a lawyer dedicated to the usage of law for the promotion of social change to address a cause. Cause lawyering is commonly described as a practice of "lawyering for the good" or using law to empower members of the weaker layers of society. It may or may not be performed pro bono. Cause lawyering is frequently practiced by individual lawyers or lawyers employed by associations that aim to supply a public service to complement state-provided legal aid.
Cause lawyering is performed by a lawyer or a firm that is "most frequently directed at altering some aspect of the social, economic, and political status quo." The content of the issue is not particularly relevant, only the advocacy of an issue and the attempt to bring about social change through legal or even quasi-legal avenues. Cause lawyering can include dedicated advocacy by public interest firms, pro bono work by attorneys in private practice and other non-traditional forms of law practice that advocates a cause. Lawyers who work for the government, whether federal, state, or local, can also be cause lawyers; although the majority of cause lawyering tends to be adversarial towards the state.
Definition
As coined by experts Stuart Scheingold and Austin Sarat in their work Something to Believe In: Politics, Professionalism, and Cause Lawyering, cause lawyering consists of "using legal skills to pursue ends and ideals that transcend client service – be those ideals social, cultural, political, economic or indeed, legal". There is no single "correct" way to define what Cause Lawyering is or who is a cause lawyer. Cause lawyering is particularly hard to put limits around because it encompasses so much in the legal world and almost any issue can be considered an issue or cause that is being advocated for, and thereby qualifying as cause lawyering. Cause lawyering does not require a particular political side, but does require a "determination to take sides in political and moral struggle without making distinctions between worthy and unworthy causes".
Cause lawyering is less about the client and more about the issue the client represents. Cause lawyering is about the belief in a cause or issue and the will/desire to advance that cause. Cause lawyers tend to choose clients on the basis of their own ideological grounds, no matter where they fall on the political, social, economic, and /or legal spectrum. What ultimately separates the cause lawyer from other types of lawyers is the advancement of the cause through the client to transform the status quo in service to a cause that is just as important, or more important, than the client.
In a 2004 American Bar Foundation essay, Thomas M. Hilbink outlined the "typolog[ies]" of cause lawyering. In this essay, cause lawyers are broken into three typologies: (1) Proceduralist Lawyering; (2) Elite-Vanguard Lawyering; and (3) Grassroots Lawyering. Proceduralist lawyering is "marked by a belief in the separation of law and politics, and a belief that the legal system is essentially fair and just". Elite-Vanguard lawyering focuses on law as a superior form of politics that uses the law to render substantive justice in a way that will change substantive law and thereby change society. Grassroots lawyering, however, approaches law as "just" another form of politics, a venue that is corrupt, unjust, or unfair, and aims to achieve substantive social justice through using the law in combination of other social movements, but refraining from using the law as a primary method for social change.
History
What is now known as cause lawyering grew when the idea of "legal science", a 19th-century belief of legal objectivity in which law could be determined through the application of scientific principles and methodologies, was challenged. Until the late 19th century, the legal field worked to separate law and politics, precluding the idea that the law could be used as a force for political or social change. The first organizations to break into cause lawyering and tear down the idea came into existence in the 20th century, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Through intermixing political progressivism and the law, these two organizations paved the way for politically themed legal entities to use the law in a way that would advance the cause they represented.