Prefigurative legal education

Sameer M. Ashar

Chapter 21 in Research Handbook on Global Legal Education, 2026, pp 401-421 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: As our social problems deepen and movements rise to meet those challenges, lawyers must expand their repertoire to support transformative visions. Social-movement organizations are not only developing policy platforms, but also experimenting with legal advocacy and institutional development that meet human needs and strive to resist liberal cooption. Movements are engaged in prefigurative thinking, outside of the terms and constraints of our present late-neoliberal moment of global climate emergency and democratic crisis. Building on the work of Davina Cooper on everyday utopias, the Marxist and anarchist theorists of prefigurative politics, and Stefano Harney and Fred Moten on the undercommons, this chapter asks how we may teach ourselves—lawyers and law students—to work with social-movement organizations on projects that prefigure utopian social arrangements. Is utopian imagination antithetical to training for legal practice? How can we help extend utopian imagination to the core social problems on which we work in clinical legal education? Along with several cautionary notes, this chapter suggests two methods with which to experiment: social analysis and radical imagination.

Keywords: Social Movement Lawyering and Legal Education; Utopian Thinking in Late-neoliberalism; Radical Imagination; Clinical Legal Education; Prefigurative Politics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781788117005
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