Abstract
Gerald Lopez’s ground breaking book, Rebellious Lawyering: One Chicano’s Vision of Progressive Law Practice, introduced new critical pathways and perspectives for clinical educators to better understand and enhance their advocacy, teaching, and scholarship. Indeed, Lopez’s interdisciplinary investigation of the local, sociocultural context of the lawyering process produced a marked shift in both the pedagogy and the practice of public interest law, particularly civil rights and poverty law. A quarter century after its publication, Rebellious Lawyering stands out not only for its contextual critique of lawyering theory and practice, but also for its multifaceted integration of law, cultural studies, race and ethnicity, grassroots politics, and social movement history. At the same time, because it is descriptively anecdotal, rather than empirical, and prescriptively normative, rather than strictly methodological, it remains a work of organic and evolving clinical pedagogy and practice. The purpose of this article is to examine Rebellious Lawyering as a transformative, albeit unresolved, work of clinical theory and practice, and, thus, to underscore the continuing need to revise its teachings and practices to address a new century of poverty and inequality in America.