LRR Focus: We Need to Get Together More

[Excerpt] Luvernel Clark is shop steward of ACTWU Local 1742 in Knoxville, Tennessee and chairperson of the Tennessee Industrial Renewal Network\u27s Maquiladora Committee which participated in a worker exchange to Mexico in the summer of 1991. She works at Allied Signal, in a plant that had 3000 employees in 1971, but today has less than 400, The jobs were sent by Allied first to a non-union greenfield location in Greenville, Alabama in 1982, and from there to Agua Prieta, Mexico. Fran Ansley, associate professor at the University of Tennessee College of Law and member of the TIRN delegation, interviewed Clark for Labor Research Review

Inclusive Boundaries and Other (Im)possible Paths Toward Community Development in a Global World

This paper is based on a talk given at a University of Pennsylvania symposium on Social Movements and Law Reform. In it Professor Ansley takes as a case study the U.S. movement against plant closings. In the seventies, eighties and nineties this movement attempted to respond to the increasing flow of industrial capital from the U.S. to other countries. Like other social movements, it devoted a significant part of its energy to framing its issues - articulating and attempting to promote a particular way of looking at the issue of plant closings, de-industrialization, and the new international division of labor. Drawing in part on her own experiences as a participant/observer in the plant-closing movement, Professor Ansley describes the initial frame developed by plant-closing rhetoricians to situate the movement\u27s issues and justify its demands. That frame valorized the notion of bounded political communities as central to democracy. It called for the creation and defense of polities with jurisdiction strong enough to establish effective boundaries and impose economic ground rules on footloose corporations. Ansley confesses continued affection for this frame. In fact, one section of the article points to recent disputes initiated under Chapter 11 of NAFTA that confirm the profound importance of bounded polities empowered to set ground rules for economic actors and others. However, she goes on to tell how troubling it was to many who had been extolling the importance of strong boundaries when the plant-closing movement was confronted with the upsurge of migration into the United States from the third world. In this new context, rhetoric from the plant-closing movement that had seemed progressive in its original context suddenly showed itself to have a dangerously exclusionary side. Ansley claims that the tension between the need for bounded polities and the need for open borders is a significant paradox. In light of contemporary forms of globalization, bounded communities appear simultaneously to be crucial bulwarks that protect democracy, and racist fortresses that render it impossible. Although she makes no pretense of attempting to resolve this paradox, she urges its importance, especially for lawyers interested in the dynamics of globalization

Working in the Public Interest Law Conference

Entirely student organized, WIPI seeks to bring together eminent practitioners in their respective fields, students, and faculty to discuss practical approaches to lawyering which can best serve the poor. Practical methods of challenging poverty are often not covered in traditional law school courses. This conference seeks to remedy that and provide dynamic, creative ways to combat poverty through the vehicle of the law