Songster, López, and Torres on Participatory Law Scholarship as Demosprudence @AmistadLaw @Rachel_E_Lopez @TempleLaw @YaleLawSch @VirginiaLawRev

Kempis Songster, Amistad Law Project, Rachel López, Temple University School of Law, Princeton University Program in Law & Public Policy, and Gerald Torres, Yale Law School, have published Participatory Law Scholarship as Demosprudence at 110 Virginia Law Review 298 (2024).

This Essay situates Participatory Law Scholarship (PLS) within the framework of “demosprudence”—a concept developed by Lani Guinier and co-author Gerald Torres that examines how ordinary people, often acting collectively, participate in making legal meaning by shifting societal narratives that inform the law. Namely, it explores the role that participatory methods in legal scholarship can play in democratizing the law and enhancing the practice of democracy. Specifically, at a time when democracy is facing a stress test that threatens the premises upon which it is based, PLS is one method for addressing the alienation between law and society that is in part to blame for the renewed rise of authoritarianism. The technicalities of the law often make non-lawyers feel disconnected from it and encourage apathy towards it as a vehicle of social change. Traditional legal scholarship sometimes aids and abets this disconnection from the law by favoring a doctrinal focus that can feel so detached from how the law operates on the ground that it is rendered irrelevant to those who experience it most intimately. PLS democratizes the law by making it more accessible to non-lawyers and facilitating greater participation in the process of making legal meaning. We thus argue that legal scholarship is both a venue for studying this phenomenon and also a site for demosprudential genesis.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.