Francine T. Sherman

Engaging New Forms of Social Inquiry and Social Action

During the twentieth century, the scientific enterprise, enshrined primarily within the world’s great research universities, has increasingly come to be viewed as the central hero of modernity. The university itself has become, in Robert Pirsig’s (1974) phrase, the church of modernity. With the advent in the 1990s of global capitalism, along with the Internet and the World Wide Web, scientific inquiry has paradoxically become the primary source of economic creativity and growth. We say this is paradoxical because the most authoritative paradigm of modern science— empirical positivism—attempts to divorce “value-free” scientific observing and theorizing from “value-driven” social action (see Torbert, ). We are transitioning from national industrial economies to a global information economy, and at the same time our urban centers are concentrations of poverty, marginalization, and despair (Fleming, 1999). Ignoring this context, our dominant paradigms for research, thought, and action are still based on mechanistic, technological, unidirectional causation and unilateral power.

Leadership and Lawyering: Learning New Ways to See Juvenile Justice

Launched in the Fall of 1996 at Boston College, the Juvenile Rights Advocacy Project’s Girls’ Initiative (JRAP) uses critical lawyering to serve traditional legal needs of delinquent girls, engage their needs across disciplines, and support their voices in policy and program development. This chapter begins by describing the historical context within which critical juvenile rights lawyering is developing. Next, it draws on the girls’ voices heard in discussion groups held in 1996 and 1998 to demonstrate the connection between individual client goals and system goals on behalf of clients. The chapter then follows one girl’s situation through a single issue approach to legal representation, a fully collaborative, cross-categorical approach to individual representation, and finally a political approach aimed at system reform. That case examination is followed by an initial discussion of the sort of thinking required of critical lawyers and the pedagogy appropriate in a law school clinic designed toward critical lawyering for delinquent youth.