The Participatory Law Fund (PLF), an innovative tool to enable the growth of the field of Participatory Law Scholarship, has launched at Temple Law School and is in the process of building its next cohort of recipients.
Participatory Law Scholarship (PLS) is legal scholarship written collaboratively by legal academics and authors whose expertise in the law’s function and dysfunction derives from lived experience rather than formal legal training. In 2021, with experiential experts Terrell Carter and Kempis Songster, Professor Rachel López co-authored Redeeming Justice, which pioneered the field, receiving the 2022 Law and Society Association Article Prize for exceptional scholarship. In further collaborations, they have published co-authored works in the Virginia Law Review Online, the Minnesota Law Review, and the Columbia Law Review Forum.
This writing experience generated the idea of PLS as a field and underscored the importance of scholarly contributions by those who have not been formally trained in law, but have expertise in law through lived experience. Professor López’s essay in the Columbia Law Review has been credited with laying out the parameters of the field, namely that “by foregrounding lived experience in law’s injustice, PLS unearths and disrupts the prevailing narratives undergirding the law … (and) creates more space for social and legal change. By design, PLS also reminds us of the humanity behind the law, acting as a moral check and balance.” The Participatory Law Fund helps to make this vision a reality by providing financial support for experiential experts to devote the time needed to engage in scholarly work.
Prior work and works in progress by scholars who have received PLF grants include Afghan Allies in Limbo: Discrimination in the U.S. Immigration Response, which examines the U.S. immigration response to the Afghan humanitarian crisis following the Taliban takeover from the perspective of a women’s rights activist who experienced it firsthand; The Violence of Bright Lines, which centers lived experience in its critique of Miller v. Alabama, a 2012 Supreme Court decision that found that laws that require courts to sentence defendants under 18 to life without parole violate the Eighth Amendment; Tell It to Me Plainly: Toward Recognizing a Federal Right to Readily Understandable Information About Their Services for Persons with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, which identifies information barriers that prevent persons living with intellectual and developmental disabilities from making informed choices and decisions about their lives; Youth Participatory Law Scholarship: Celebrating Youth Resistance and Prefiguring Utopian Arrangements, which celebrates the resistance of Sa’Real McRae, a young Black activist, organizer, and legal worker; and Participatory Law Beyond Black and White: Critical Considerations of Racial Perspectives for Practitioners in Building Participatory Relationships, which examines the role of structural abuses in shaping attitudes and perspectives of distrust and apathy toward the law.
The PLF offers exciting synergies for Temple Law. Lived expert April Lee benefited from PLF funding to co-author, with Temple Law Professor Sarah Katz, Lies My Child Welfare System Has Told Me: The Critical Importance of Centering Families’ Voices in Family Policing Legal Advocacy . Their article, which proposes a critical framework to acknowledge the intentional trauma and harm caused by the family policing system, and to disrupt and dismantle the fictions underpinning the laws and regulations that continue to perpetuate these harms, was published in the October 2024 issue of Family Court Review.
“I am delighted that Professor López has brought the rich foundations of PLS to Temple Law, as I can see how generative this work has already been and will continue to be for our faculty,” said Jaya Ramji-Nogales, who serves as the Sheller Family Professor of Public Interest Law. “It is an honor to host the PLF, which will enable ongoing critical conversations to identify the role of law and legal institutions in perpetrating systemic oppression, and to design reform efforts that are informed by lived experience in order to pursue emancipatory futures within and beyond our systems of justice.”
“I am, above all, grateful to the experiential experts who continue to grow this emerging genre of legal scholarship,” López said. “Their legal analysis, critique, and vision for more just laws, grounded in their lived experience, are of immeasurable value. The PLF is one way we can acknowledge and thank them for their extraordinary gifts. I’m grateful it has found a home at Temple Law.”
As Participatory Law Scholarship continues to grow as a field, López is optimistic that the Participatory Law Fund will keep pace and will grow as well. “What the PLF makes possible is truly extraordinary,” she says. “It recognizes and rewards the dignity, courage, and wisdom of those who have lived through the best and the worst our laws have to offer. And, by centering their voices, it enables their experience to shape the law in ways that will benefit all of us.”