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5 Trespassing Benny, the Homeless Man Querida Fermina, I hope this letter finds you in good health. I am really excited because I am teaching law and subordination. Before describing my current case, I want to tell you a little bit about the class. I feel privileged to have the opportunity to work with these young people. Actually, they are not all that young. We have an interesting mix of people. It’s the kind of class that would normally be taught at a fancy law school, and here I am teaching it to undergraduates through ethnic studies. The class is supposed to be joint-listed with sociology, but because of an oversight, it did not appear on the schedule under the sociology listings. What is law and subordination? The class is modeled after some of the classes we took in the lawyering for social change (LSC) curriculum at Stanford—like classes in teaching self-help and lay lawyering. The program became defunct once Gerald López left for UCLA. With classes like these, the goal is simply to have people reading about advocacy on behalf of subordinated groups and then applying the things that they learned in a placement setting, working with those subordinated groups. It is interesting because Gerald (“Jerry”) was a lawyer who believed that people who are working with the poor and people of Color have to know something about the cultures and experiences of these groups. He was, in fact, a lawyer who believed that you have to know something about sociology and anthropology and the cultures of subordinated groups in order to be an effective advocate. In other words, he was a lawyer who wanted to integrate sociology and anthropology into law, and I’m a sociologist who became a lawyer and wants to integrate law into sociology and ethnic studies. Being a sociologist and a rebellious lawyer is a lot like being bilingual and bicultural, because you are knowledgeable Trespassing 105 and live in two distinct worlds that may touch but seldom intersect. And this may sound pretentious, but you end up feeling like you know more than people in either of these two worlds. Don’t misunderstand! I can talk to lawyers and to sociologists and anthropologists, but they can’t usually talk to each other. One of the goals of my class is to train students to serve as lay advocates for subordinate groups who do not normally have access to law, lawyers, or advocates. The class is unique in that it normally involves a placement working with a subordinated group and doing simulation exercises, where students can practice, in front of the class, the presentations that they will be making in the field, with the goal of having the presentations critiqued by the class. I limit the enrollment to ten to twelve students. The students in the class work in one of several placements, including the Day Laborers Group (DLG), At Risk Youth or the Youth Advocacy Project (YAP), and the Homeless Advocacy Group (HAG). The third component of the class, in addition to the placement and simulation exercises, is doing theoretical readings about law and subordination and advocacy on behalf of subordinated groups. The class is an ambitious enterprise because I am teaching, in fact, a critique of traditional law doctrine and the hierarchical view of lawyering and law practice—but one can’t critique something unless one first understands that something; in other words, my class and I have to know a little bit about law in order to better critique it. The class is not a law class. It is an advocacy class, or a cross between lay lawyering and community organizing. Yet my students are going to have to learn about law. For example, you can’t talk about developing a know-yourrights workshop on the Fourth Amendment or immigration unless you know something about these doctrines.At the same time, a philosophical principle underlying the class is that law should be something that is readily accessible to everyone, not only to lawyers or law scholars. It is based on a bottom-up view of law and law practice. I have asked the students to write weekly field reports. The goal is to report on and critically evaluate their field experiences, the readings, and class discussions. However, since we will not be discussing the readings until next week, I have asked the students to write something about who they are, how they got to be in...

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