Youth Participatory Law Scholarship

By Sarah Medina Camiscoli & Sa'Real McRae*

Symposium — Volume 110

Nov 13, 2024
110 Va. L. Rev. Online 313
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*Sarah Medina Camiscoli is an Assistant Professor of Law at Rutgers Law School Newark. Sa'Real McRae is the Youth Executive Director at the Peer Defense Project. McRae and Medina Camiscoli met through their work at the Peer Defense Project, a movement lawyering shop led by and for youth leaders. This Essay was funded by the Participatory Law Fund at Temple University Beasley School of Law.Show More

This Essay joins a formally trained legal scholar-practitioner with a grassroots youth activist and advocate to introduce the emerging subgenre of Youth Participatory Law Scholarship (“YPLS”). YPLS expands on the movement for Participatory Law Scholarship by including youth co-authors whom U.S. legal systems have excluded from democracy and whom legal academia have silenced in scholarship. YPLS works to repair this harm against young people by elevating youth legal knowledge and contributions to law through co-authoring legal scholarship.

This piece makes two contributions to the movement of Participatory Law Scholarship (“PLS”). In Part I, McRae shares a narrative account of the unique ways that legal professionals have silenced her voice. In Part II, Medina Camiscoli outlines strategies that the co-authors have co-created to build a shared understanding of racial capitalism and adultism in legal institutions and reparative practices to share ownership of the writing process. The piece closes with a series of questions on which future co-authors of YPLS should reflect as they work to build scholarly practices that include and elevate the resistance and freedom dreams of mobilized and marginalized youth.

Introduction

From the inception of the settler-colonial project1 1.K-Sue Park, The History Wars and Property Law: Conquest and Slavery as Foundational to the Field, 131 Yale L.J. 1062, 1067 (2022) (“The predominant understanding of U.S. law and legal institutions, most simply, is built on a narrative from which the histories of colonization and enslavement—and the ways they shaped the evolution of racial dynamics in this country—have been erased over time.”).Show More to present threats of authoritarianism,2 2.Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, This Is Not a Drill: The War Against Antiracist Teaching in America, 68 UCLA L. Rev. 1702, 1725 (2022) (“[T]he relationship between authoritarian tyranny and white supremacy make it abundantly clear that there is no daylight between attacks on democracy and attacks on antiracism.”).Show More youth3 3.“Young” refers broadly to people between the ages of 12–24 years old—the age band when youth have increased capacity for advocacy. See Daniel J. Siegel, Brainstorm: The Power and Purpose of the Teenage Brain 6–9 (2013) (explaining how adolescence spans across the ages of 12–24 years old, during which the frontal cortex develops and people present a higher proclivity for novelty, risk, social cohesion, and intense emotions). The Supreme Court has assumed this interpretation of prefrontal cortex development for youth under the age of 18. See Roper v. Simmons, 543 U.S. 551, 569–71, 578 (2005) (banning the death penalty for minors); Graham v. Florida, 560 U.S. 48, 68, 82 (2010) (banning sentences of mandatory life imprisonment without parole for minors convicted of crimes other than homicide); Miller v. Alabama, 567 U.S. 460, 471–72, 489 (2012) (banning sentences of mandatory life imprisonment without parole for minors convicted of homicide).Show More leaders have interpreted, resisted, and enhanced democracy4 4.Lani Guinier & Gerald Torres, Changing the Wind: Notes Toward a Demosprudence of Law and Social Movements, 123 Yale L.J. 2740, 2745–46 n.12 (2014) (explaining how social movements have created “both constituencies of accountability and alternative and authoritative interpretative communities”).Show More under U.S. law.5 5.See generally Sarah Medina Camiscoli, Teenage Rebels and the Demand for Due Process, Geo. J.L. & Mod. Critical Race Persps. (forthcoming 2024) (on file with authors) [hereinafter Medina Camiscoli, Teenage Rebels] (recounting the demosprudence of young women, enslaved youth, kidnapped indigenous youth, immigrant youth, and gender expansive youth). See also Sarah Medina Camiscoli, Youth Movement Law: The Case for Interpreting the Constitution with Mobilized Youth, 26 U. Pa. J. Const. L. (forthcoming 2024) (manuscript at 9, 52–53) (on file with authors) [hereinafter Medina Camiscoli, Youth Movement Law] (discussing the strategies of transgender and gender expansive youth leaders to pursue abolition, a Constitution of positive rights, and radical forms of direct democracy).Show More However, formally trained law practitioners and legal scholars have largely failed to include youth contributions as a source of legitimate knowledge.6 6.The Participatory Law Scholarship movement has illuminated the harms of excluding marginalized peoples’ voices in legal knowledge productions. See Rachel López & Terrell Carter, If Lived Experience Could Speak: A Legal Method for Repairing Epistemic Violence in Law & the Legal Academy, 109 Minn. L. Rev. (forthcoming 2024) (manuscript at 4), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4741795 [https://perma.cc/MRB5-YT‌JU] (“[A]cademics often evoke the stories of [marginalized] communities without asking them what they think is best for them or making them the authors of their own stories. Then, their extracted stories are guarded behind paywalls inaccessible to them and in some instances, as will be detailed below, used against them as a matter of law.” (footnote omitted)). See generally Rachel López, Participatory Law Scholarship, 123 Colum. L. Rev. 1795 (2023) (describing the theory and practice of Participatory Law Scholarship).Show More In fact, scholars rarely acknowledge the age of the people who catalyzed, created, and enhanced U.S. laws and legal systems. For example, originalist legal scholars have not yet discussed the oddity that multiple “key American Revolution figures” were only teenagers when they took up arms against the British, and yet most teenagers today cannot even vote in their school board elections.7 7.Todd Andrlik, How Old Were the Leaders of the American Revolution on July 4, 1776?, Slate (Aug. 20, 2013, 5:30 AM), https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2013/08/how-old-were-the-founding-fathers-the-leaders-of-the-american-revolution-were-younger-than-we-imagine‌.html [https://perma.cc/L38F-AR‌F9]; see also John S.C. Abbot, Lives of the Presidents of the United States of America, From Washington to the Present Time210 (Portland, H. Hallett & Co. 1879) (“[T]he first time [Andrew Jackson] took part in active service [was at fourteen years old] . . . . Andrew and his brother were taken prisoners. A British officer ordered him to brush his mud-spattered boots, I am a prisoner of war, not your servant,’ was the reply of the dauntless boy.”); c.f. Joseph Fishkin, Weightless Votes, 121 Yale L.J. 1888, 1904 (2012) (“‘[T]he framers were aware that this apportionment and representation base would include categories of persons who were ineligible to vote—women, children, bound servants, convicts, the insane, and, at a later time, aliens.’” (quoting Garza v. County of Los Angeles, 918 F.2d 763, 774 (9th Cir. 1990)); Julian Roberts-Grmela, A Seat Without A Voice: Student School Board Members Have No Voting Power, Chalkbeat (Jan. 24, 2023, 3:14 PM), https://www.ch‌alkbeat.org/newyork/2023/1/24/23569203/nyc-school-board-panel-for-educational-policy-st‌udent-power/ [https://perma.cc/M3AX-YHYA] (featuring students who deal with the “hard lesson” that students cannot vote on the school board even if they win a seat, which further elevates the disconnect between policies and their realities).Show More Similarly, abolitionist legal scholars do not often discuss how enslaved Gabriel Prosser, at 24 years old, led a historic rebellion of enslaved peoples,8 8.See Douglas R. Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802, at 20, 45, 48, 165, 168 (1993); Darrell A.H. Miller, Estoppel by Nonviolence, 85 Law & Contemp. Probs. 69, 73 (2022) (“In 1800, a blacksmith named Gabriel, [enslaved] by a planter named Prosser, planned a multiracial republican revolution against slavery and merchant oppression in Henrico County, Virginia.”); Dorothy E. Roberts, Foreword: Abolition Constitutionalism, 133 Harv. L. Rev. 1, 63–64 (2019) (“The abolitionist Constitution was forged, as well, by ordinary black folks who abandoned plantations, served in the Union Army, and demanded recognition of their equal citizenship.”).Show More one of several rebellions which catalyzed the abolitionist movement and signified the struggle for the recognition of civil rights only later realized through the ratification of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments.9 9.See Roberts, supra note 8, at 63–64.Show More Likewise, scholars have not seriously considered the significance of the fact that Sitting Bull was only fourteen years old when he participated in his first war party, beginning his effort to demand land rights and legal sovereignty for indigenous communities.10 10.Robert M. Utley, The Last Sovereigns: Sitting Bull and the Resistance of the Free Lakotas 3 (2020); B.J. Jones, Welcoming Tribal Courts into the Judicial Fraternity: Emerging Issues in Tribal-State and Tribal-Federal Court Relations, 24 Wm. Mitchell L. Rev. 457, 514 n.255 (1998) (recognizing that “[a]lthough Sitting Bull was not a jurist in the English common law sense,” his people called on him to mediate governance disputes and resist injustice regarding indigenous sovereignty).Show More Further, few have credited the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee for the birth of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 or migrant youth for the passage of the Agricultural Labor Relations Act (“ALRA”).11 11.Guinier & Torres, supra note 4, at 2799 (“Without the MFDP, without SNCC, without the march from Selma to Montgomery, there would have been no Voting Rights Act in 1965 . . . . Similarly, without the UFW—and its capacity to organize allies across the country . . . there would have been no Agricultural Labor Relations Act (ALRA) in California.”).Show More

Over the course of the last twenty years, more youth have continued this tradition of resistance and legal interpretation than ever before.12 12.Erica Chenoweth, Zoe Marks, Matthew Cebul & Miranda Rivers, Youth and LGBTQ+ Participation in Nonviolent Action, USAID (Jan. 2023), https://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PA00‌ZSDF.pdf [https://perma.cc/E42J-SHA8] (finding more nonviolent protest activities than ever before, which also include a greater number of LGBTQ+ and youth participants).Show More These mobilized youth, like those who came before them, have seeded a constitutional renewal in a moment of democratic decay;13 13.See Medina Camiscoli, Youth Movement Law, supra note 5 (manuscript at 8) (arguing that “mobilized youth play an essential role in transforming the present ‘political crisis’ into an opportunity to reimagine American democracy” (citations omitted)); Jack M. Balkin, The Cycles of Constitutional Time 44 (2020) (arguing that the United States is experiencing constitutional rot and defining constitutional decay or rot as “[w]hen a republic . . . loses its connection to the joint pursuit of the public good”).Show More they demand commonsense gun laws,14 14.Mass shootings present an enormous public health crisis, as they constitute the number one cause of death of children in the United States. James G. Hodge, Jr., Erica N. White, Rebecca Freed & Nora Wells, Supreme Court Impacts in Public Health Law: 2021–2022, 50 J.L. Med. & Ethics 608, 610 (2022) (“Extending Second Amendment rights to include general self-defense outside the home threatens a multitude of public health regulations aimed at reducing firearm-related morbidity and mortality as Congress ponders federal legislative limits after multiple acts of gun violence in Buffalo, Uvalde (TX), and other locales in 2022.”); see also German Lopez, It’s Official: March for Our Lives Was One of the Biggest Youth Protests Since the Vietnam War, Vox (Mar. 26, 2018, 10:10 AM), https://www.vox.com/polic‌y-and-politics/2018/3/26/17160646/march-for-our-lives-crowd-size-count [https://perma.cc/‌Y8BN-MKHQ] (detailing how March for Our Lives included over 1.2 million people nationwide and was “one of the biggest rallies for gun control ever in the nation’s capital”); Fordham L. Ctr. on Race, L. & Just., Youth Power Not Guns, Vimeo (Oct. 25, 2023), https://vi‌meo.com/884009211 [https://perma.cc/XN8Q-ADS6].Show More abolition,15 15.The United States still incarcerates more young people than any other country in the world. See Alec Karakatsanis, The Punishment Bureaucracy: How to Think About “Criminal Justice Reform,” 128 Yale L.J.F. 848, 849–50 (2019) (using the term “human caging” to de-normalize the mass incarceration crisis in the United States). See generally Peer Def. Project, Abolish New York City’s Youth Punishment Systems (2023) (Anna Milliken & Kailyn Gaines eds.), https://acrobat.adobe.com/link/review?uri=urn:aaid:scds:US:df106b9c-53a8-34‌f4-97bc‌-206923b41449 [https://perma.cc/K2PX-PYJ4] (a youth-authored guide to the legal systems and history of punishing and caging of young people in New York City). See also Matthew Clair & Amanda Woog, Courts and the Abolition Movement, 110 Calif. L. Rev. 1, 7 (2022) (describing how the movement for abolition has impacted the court system through “(1) power shifting, (2) defunding and reinvesting, and (3) transformation”).Show More climate justice,16 16.“Six in ten each of Millennials and Gen Z see climate change as a critical threat to U.S. interests.” Emily Sullivan, Millennials and Gen Z Sound the Alarm on Climate Change, Chi. Council on Glob. Affs. (Jan. 18, 2023), https://globalaffairs.org/commentary-and-analysis/bl‌ogs/millennials-and-gen-z-sound-alarm-climate-change [https://perma.cc/6ZHV-AK8G]; see Camila Bustos, Movement Lawyering in the Time of the Climate Crisis, 39 Pace Env’t L. Rev. 1, 17 (2022) (describing Juliana v. United States, 947 F.3d 1159 (9th Cir. 2020), as “a groundbreaking case where a group of youth plaintiffs filed a constitutional climate lawsuit to challenge the federal government’s actions causing climate change, alleging violations to their right to life, liberty, and property”).Show More racial justice,17 17.Larry Buchanan, Quoctrung Bui & Jugal K. Patel, Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement in U.S. History, N.Y. Times (July 3, 2020), https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2‌020/07/03/us/george-floyd-protests-crowd-size.html [https://perma.cc/7F6Z-ZPHK]; see Rashawn Ray, Black Lives Matter at 10 Years: 8 Ways the Movement Has Been Highly Effective, Brookings (Oct. 12, 2022), https://www.brookings.edu/articles/black-lives-matter-at-10-years-what-impact-has-it-had-on-policing/ [https://perma.cc/5N9K-3UW6] (explaining how Black Lives Matter transformed laws and policies around the United States).Show More economic justice,18 18.Young workers and mobilized students transformed the landscape of the labor movement. See Leanna First-Arai, Young Workers Are Bridging the Climate and Labor Movements, Teen Vogue (July 25, 2022), https://www.teenvogue.com/story/young-workers-labor-movement [https://perma.cc/4498-P7QT]; see also Zeynep Biyikli, Students Leverage Their University Affiliation to Gain Ground in the Fight Against Starbucks’s Union-Busting Efforts, 49 Hum. Rts. 36, 36 (2023) (“[U]niversity students across the country have reconsidered their school’s financial relationships with one of the most prolific union-busters in modern history.”).Show More migrant justice,19 19.Sylvia R. Lazos Vargas, The Immigrant Rights Marches (Las Marchas): Did the “Gigante” (Giant) Wake Up or Does It Still Sleep Tonight?, 7 Nev. L.J. 780, 788, 790 (2007) (noting the 2006 Los Angeles protest of La Gran Marcha as the largest demonstration for immigrant rights in U.S. history, where “[s]tudents staged ‘walkouts’ for three consecutive days following ‘la Gran Marcha.’”).Show More gender justice,20 20.See Medina Camiscoli, Youth Movement Law, supra note 5 (manuscript at 59–77) (outlining over eighty youth organizations resisting laws that target gender expansive youth).Show More education justice,21 21.See generally Medina Camiscoli, Teenage Rebels, supra note 5 (elevating the demosprudence of youth movement leaders in Students Engaged in Advancing Texas (“SEAT”) coalition fighting book bans in and outside of legal institutions).Show More health justice,22 22.Months before the Supreme Court struck down constitutional protections for abortion, youth movement leaders began building mutual aid networks to protect access. See Christine Mui, “Thanks for Hating, It Helps the Movement”: How a 19 Year Old Used Her Internet Trolls to Raise $2 Million for Abortion Access in Less Than a Week, Fortune (Aug. 6, 2022, 6:00 AM), https://fortune.com/2022/08/06/teenager-fundraiser-abortion-access-gen-z-2-milli‌on [https://perma.cc/PCU5-ZQDG]; Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Org., 142 S. Ct. 2228, 2284–85 (2022) (abolishing the constitutional right to abortion and allowing states to make independent decisions about regulating abortion access).Show More and housing justice.23 23.Young tenants have organized across communities and college campuses to demand a right to housing in the midst of a housing crisis. See, Youth All. For Hous., About, https://www.y4h.org/about [https://perma.cc/A2UJ-CK9C] (last visited Oct. 13, 2024) (“[E]nvision[ing] a world where housing is de-commodified, houselessness does not exist, and everyone is guaranteed a safe, quality, and permanently affordable home.”); Jonathan Franklin, Howard University Students Reach an Agreement with Officials After a Month of Protest, NPR (Nov. 15, 2021, 8:12 PM), https://www.npr.org/2021/11/15/1055929172/howar‌d-university-students-end-protest-housing-agreement [https://perma.cc/5E5U-US42] (describing how students protested uninhabitable housing conditions on Howard University’s campus); John Infranca, The New State Zoning: Land Use Preemption Amid A Housing Crisis, 60 B.C. L. Rev. 823, 829 (2019) (“The breadth and depth of the housing crisis in communities throughout the country has made housing affordability a salient issue for a broader swath of the population.”).Show More

Instead of building camaraderie with these young visionaries,24 24.See López, supra note 6, at 1798 (“[Participatory Law Scholarship] also involves another profoundly human element, one that is fundamental to the ethos and epistemology of Participatory Law Scholarship: camaraderie.”).Show More formally trained legal professionals have participated in epistemic violence by erasing and excluding young people’s ways of knowing the law from legal scholarship. Fortunately, the Participatory Law Scholarship (“PLS”) movement has been developing a framework to “fumbl[e] towards repair”25 25.See generally Mariame Kaba & Shira Hassan, Fumbling Towards Repair: A Workbook for Community Accountability Facilitators (2019) (providing tips and educational materials to community accountability facilitators). See also I. India Thusi, Book Review, Feminist Scripts for Punishment, 134 Harv. L. Rev. 2449, 2480 (2021) (discussing Mariame Kaba and Shira Hassan’s workbook Fumbling Towards Repair, “which provides facilitation guidance on responding to harm and encouraging people who inflict harm to take responsibility”).Show More of epistemic violence in the legal academy. Specifically, PLS practitioners build partnerships between people “academically trained [as] legal scholars” and people “with lived experience confronting the daily realities of injustice and organizing the disenfranchised.”26 26.See López, supra note 6, at 1800; see also id. (“PLS “shifts power to people who are not lawyers, establishing them as experts in their own legal realities . . . push[ing] the boundaries of how society and the legal academy understand their interventions.”).Show More By joining these groups of people as co-authors, PLS practitioners reallocate the “time, training, and resources to engage in deep research” away from individual legal scholars and toward partnerships and projects that “develop further support for the episteme of organic jurists, by bolstering it with other empirical evidence, grounding it in legal doctrine, and connecting it with other theories and literature.”27 27.Id. at 1801.Show More

In this Essay, we stretch the tradition of PLS to acknowledge and repair what PLS scholars call the “academic silencing”28 28.See The HLS Conference Organizers, Critical Race Theory: Inside and Beyond the Ivory Tower, 69 UCLA L. Rev. Disc. (Law Meets World) 118, 126–27 (2022) (arguing that the recent surge in “anti-CRT” legislation targeted at schools is an example of epistemicide and recognizing that law school spaces fail to critique the “dominant epistemics of law”); see also López & Carter, supra note 6 (manuscript at 36) (defining “academic silencing” as “using the tools at academics’ disposal to suppress or alter [marginalized] knowledge” and observing that “[l]egal academics regularly speak for the marginalized, articulating how the law could better serve them, but rarely ceding space or resources so that the subaltern can speak for themselves”).Show More and legal smothering29 29.Legal scholars have argued that legal academia emboldens racial capitalism when historically marginalized people or ideas are included in university spaces to extract value from those marginalized people or ideas for the institution. See Nancy Leong, Racial Capitalism, 126 Harv. L. Rev. 2151, 2171–72 (2013) (arguing that diversity has historically been sanctioned when privileged, White people in the academy decide they can derive social or economic value from nonwhiteness).Show More of young people in the legal academy and other legal institutions.30 30.See López & Carter, supra note 6 (manuscript at 23) (“We employ the term legal smothering to describe when the subaltern silences themselves either because the law prevents them from speaking for themselves or only recognizes testimony that aligns with the dominant discourse in law.”). See generally Guinier & Torres, supra note 4 (elevating the extra-judicial interpretations of law of social movements as a legitimate interpretation of law). See also Medina Camiscoli, Youth Movement Law, supra note 5 (manuscript at 7) (explaining how gender expansive youth “and their families have fled hostile states to escape skyrocketing rates of harassment, hate crimes, criminalization, suicide, and other efforts to eradicate trans people from public life” such as bans on books, community organizations, and families where young people can exercise their right to bodily autonomy); Benjamin C. Park, Rishub K. Das & Brian C. Drolet, Increasing Criminalization of Gender-Affirming Care for Transgender Youths—A Politically Motivated Crisis, 175 JAMA Pediatrics1205, 1205(2021) (discussing how laws that criminalize gender-affirming care have serious and negative health impacts on transgender and gender expansive youth).Show More Specifically, we introduce Youth Participatory Law Scholarship (“YPLS”) as a method to mitigate the silencing of youth knowledge by including young people as authors on scholarly projects about young people and building practices for humane governance of those projects.31 31.Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide 93 (2014) (defining “humane governance” of knowledge as one that “‘facilitates communication across . . . nationalist, ethnic, class, generational, cognitive, and gender divides,’ but does so with ‘respect and celebration of difference and an attitude of extreme skepticism toward exclusivist alarms that deny space for expression and exploration of others’” (quoting Richard Falk, On Humane Governance: Toward a New Global Politics 242 (1995))). The authors acknowledge the recent allegations of sexual misconduct by young, femme academics against Boaventura de Sousa Santos and assert that sexual misconduct in the academy perpetuates its own kind of epistemic injustice. See Lieselotte Viaene, Catarina Laranjeiro & Miye Nadya Tom, The Walls Spoke When No One Else Would, in Sexual Misconduct in Academia: Informing an Ethics of Care in the University 208, 208–23 (Erin Pritchard & Delyth Edwards eds., 2003) (detailing the authors’ experiences of sexual harassment at an unnamed institution where they were formerly Ph.D. students or postdoctoral researchers and its impact on knowledge production); see also Mariama Correia, Brazilian State Deputy Says She Was Sexually Assaulted by Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Publica (Apr. 14, 2023, 5:55 PM), https://apublica.org/2023/04/brazilian-state-deputy-says-she-was-sexual‌ly-assaulted-by-boaventura-de-sousa-santos/ [https://perma.cc/GY8W-ENST] (providing further information on the sexual assault allegations against Sousa Santos). Throughout the remainder of the paper, the authors make efforts to cite interpretations of epistemic violence by women legal academics in solidarity with the movement to investigate the alleged sexual misconduct and elevate the jurisprudence of marginalized women in legal academia.Show More YPLS facilitates the principles of humane governance of legal knowledge with young people through “respect and celebration of difference and an attitude of extreme skepticism toward exclusivist alarms that deny space for expression and exploration of others.”32 32.López, supra note 6, at 1827–29 (describing that the two principles that undergird equitable partnerships in the co-author model are critical self-reflection and combating academic institutionalization).Show More

Recognizing the power and bold vision of social movements as sites of legal interpretation,33 33.See Guinier & Torres, supra note 4, at 2756–57 (explaining how activist movements in American history “forge[d] new understandings of the status quo . . . [by] creating an alternative narrative of constitutional meaning”); see also Kempis Songster, Rachel López & Gerald Torres, Participatory Law Scholarship as Demosprudence, 110 Va. L. Rev. Online 298 (2024) (discussing how PLS provides a powerful methodology to democratize the law and legal scholarship and improve democratic institutions).Show More YPLS focuses on elevating youth demosprudence—that is, youth interpreting and transforming the law outside of gate-kept legal institutions.34 34.See Guinier & Torres, supra note 4, at 2750; see also López & Carter, supra note 6 (manuscript at 6) (arguing that “PLS should be seen as reparation for ongoing epistemic violence at the hands of academics and academic institutions”).Show More In doing so, co-authors of YPLS work to enhance democracy and bring youth freedom dreams into being.35 35.See Amanda Alexander, Nurturing Freedom Dreams: An Approach to Movement Lawyering in the Black Lives Matter Era, 5 How. Hum. & Civ. Rts. L. Rev. 101, 10 2, 123 (2021) (discussing how lawyers are not trained to encourage freedom dreams).Show More Further, YPLS relies on a theory of cultural democracy—a democracy where all people co-author “all the shared aspects of their lives . . . [and] can influence one another and potentially change one another’s minds” about those shared aspects.36 36.Jonathan Gingerich, Democratic Vibes, 32 Wm. & Mary Bill Rts. J. 1135, 1138 (2024); id. at 1152 (“As the Black Panther Party put it, ‘All Power to the People!’” (citing 7eventytimes7, All Power to the People!—The Black Panther Party and Beyond, YouTube (June 8, 2016), https://youtu.be/pKvE6_s0jy0 [https://perma.cc/2UNU-2G8H])).Show More

Despite their resistance, youth face unprecedented risks to their access and knowledge of law. Each day, lawmakers ban more books and criminalize more spaces where youth could learn about the democracy-enhancing power of social movements,37 37.See Guinier & Torres, supra note 4, at 2803–04 (discussing how the resistance and legal interpretation of grassroots movements have enhanced democracy through the passage of new laws, shifts in jurisprudence, and changes in public opinion).Show More develop their own interpretation of law, and imagine utopian worlds.38 38.UCLA Sch. of L. Critical Race Stud., CRT Forward, https://crtforward.law.ucla.‌edu/ [https://perma.cc/7KEK-DG8Q] (last visited Aug. 21, 2024); Jonathan Friedman & Nadine Farid Johnson, Banned in the USA: The Growing Movement to Censor Books in Schools, PEN America (Sept. 19, 2022), https://pen.org/report/banned-usa-growing-movement-to-cens‌or-books-in-schools/ [https://perma.cc/G8CC-EL8P].Show More To confront this reality, Youth Participatory Law Scholarship has emerged with two intentions: (1) produce scholarship that includes the youth voice as an authority on their own lived experience with law;39 39.See López & Carter, supra note 6 (manuscript at 48–50).Show More (2) co-create reflective practices that unlock opportunities to share in knowledge production and release gate-kept legal resources so that young people can wield those resources for power.40 40.See López, supra note 6, at 1827–29 (identifying strategies such as fostering critical self-reflection and combatting academic institutionalization as critical to the process of developing PLS partnerships and projects).Show More

In this Essay, we—one formally trained legal scholar-practitioner and one youth organizer trained as a legal worker in grassroots organizing spaces—focus on the practice of building shared social analysis and consent-based decision-making to disrupt the tradition of youth silencing and prefigure utopian arrangements in the academy.41 41.Specifically, the two situate their practice within Sameer Ashar’s theory of prefigurative pedagogy, arguing that Youth Participatory Scholarship offers a potent practice of prefigurative pedagogy where marginalized and mobilized youth—those with limited to no levers to participate in democracy or resist authoritarianism—disrupt the gatekeeping of legal knowledge that justifies their exclusion. See generally Sameer M. Ashar, Pedagogy of Prefiguration, 132 Yale L.J.F. 869 (2023) (arguing that lawyers should experiment with social analysis, radical imagination, and dialogical relationship with collaborators to prefigure utopian social arrangements with social movement organizations).Show More Within this context, we use the term “prefigure” as it has been introduced in the context of prefigurative pedagogy—“the idea that we have to build . . . our leftist institutions in the model of the world we are seeking to create.”42 42.Id. at 871 n.8 (citing Prefiguring Border Justice: Interview with Harsha Walia, 6 Critical Ethnic Stud. (Nov. 27, 2019), https://manifold.umn.edu/read/prefiguring-border-justice-inter‌view-with-harsha-walia [https://perma.cc/6MCM-NDXT]).Show More While an individual youth co-author publishing in an esteemed law review is not in and of itself revolutionary, it provides opportunities for a “fulfilled moment” of a “better way of being” where young people are credited for their contributions to law and no longer “humiliated, enslaved, forsaken, scorned, estranged, annihilated, and deprived of identity” in a decaying democracy.43 43.See also Ruth Levitas, Utopia as Method 5–6 (2013); Balkin, supra note 13, at 44 (arguing that the United States is experiencing constitutional rot and defining constitutional decay or rot as “[w]hen a republic . . . loses its connection to the joint pursuit of the public good”); Jack M. Balkin, A Symposium on Jack M. Balkin’s The Cycles of Constitutional Time: How to Do Constitutional Theory While Your House Burns Down, 101 B.U. L. Rev. 1723, 1756 (2021) (“Constitutional rot refers to the processes by which governments become increasingly less democratic and less republican. Rot is endemic to republics. A long tradition of political thought holds that republics are delicate institutions that are easily corrupted and hard to keep going. The people lose civic virtue, the institutions break down, and the norms of trust that are necessary for multiparty competition decay.”); id. at 1759 (“Issues of race, culture, religion, and identity have only made the problems worse. Over the course of four decades, the Republican Party increasingly has become a White person’s party, and politicians have used issues of race, culture, religion, and identity to motivate the Party’s base of White voters.”).Show More These fulfilled moments are prefigurative in that they build arrangements in the legal academy for a utopian democracy—one where youth co-author all shared aspects of life and have opportunities to share critiques that enhance democracy at large.

The Essay proceeds in the following way: In Part I, Sa’Real McRae—a 19-year-old Black activist, organizer, and legal worker fighting the erasure of youth knowledge of law under legislative bans—shares her story as a descriptive example of how young people, particularly mobilized young people of color, experience erasure and exclusion in knowledge production when formally trained legal professionals and other privileged advocates silence and smother youth knowledge to bolster their own progressive causes.

In Part II, we pass the pen to Sarah Medina Camiscoli to outline two reparative strategies for YPLS that have emerged through facilitating collaborative projects with mobilized youth and formally trained legal professionals—building a shared social analysis of adultism44 44.John Wall, Adultism and Voting Age Discrimination, 36 Harv. Hum. Rts. J. 327, 328 (2023) (“A first step toward a systemic understanding of adultism can be found in . . . [c]hildren’s mistreatment—for example, their being subject to physical punishment, being banned from public spaces, and lack of real voices in schools—is underwritten by the cultural acceptance of an in-built adult-child hierarchy. In . . . the political sphere, ‘adultism refers to all the behaviors and attitudes that flow from the assumption that adults are better than young people, and are entitled to act upon young people in many ways without their agreement.’ This concept of a deep-seated disrespect toward children locates the problem in broad systems of historical preconception.” (quoting Barry Checkoway, Adults as Allies, Partnerships/Community, 1996, at 14)); see also Sarah Medina Camiscoli, Paige Duggins-Clay, Maryam Salmanova & Ibtihal Chamakh, Youth Dignity Takings: How Book and Trans Bans Take Youth Property and Dignity, 1 Loy. Interdisc. J. Pub. Int. L. 1, 75 (2024) (“Adultism legitimizes the belief that Young People are inferior to adults. Adultism further justifies disregarding the contributions of Young People and excluding Youth as decision makers in their communities. Adultism vindicates attorneys who relegate Youth to periphery positions in the legal workplace as interns or community volunteers, where they will often bear the brunt of busy work or outreach for little-to-no compensation.” (footnotes omitted)).Show More within racial capitalism and wielding consent-based decision-making to co-own the writing process.45 45.Guinier & Torres, supra note 4, at 2746 n.12 (“Democracy-enhancing social change reminds us that genuine communities of consent are what justify democracy.” (emphasis added)).Show More We use the term “adultism” to refer to the structures, belief systems, and biases that position young people as inferior to their older counterparts and exclude young people as decision makers in their homes, schools, workplaces, organizations, communities, and legal systems.46 46.See Medina Camiscoli et al., supra note 44, at 74–75.Show More We use the term “racial capitalism” to refer to the way that formally trained legal professionals only include young people of color when they decide that they can “deriv[e] value from the racial identity of another person.”47 47.Leong, supra note 29, at 2153 n.7.Show More

With an eye towards McRae’s concern with erasure and extraction, Medina Camiscoli first explains how building shared social analysis in YPLS requires collaborative study and celebration of accounts of youth resistance as well as shared participation in professional development so that co-authors can share language to reflect on the inevitable manifestations of adultism and white supremacy within the context of a PLS project. Further, Medina Camiscoli explains how consent-based decision-making processes set YPLS apart from similar emerging subgenres such as Youth Movement Law48 48.See generally Medina Camiscoli, Youth Movement Law, supra note 5 (arguing for the elevation and inclusion of marginalized youths’ experiences in constitutional interpretation).Show More and Critical Youth Theory.49 49.See generally Sarah Medina Camiscoli & Kia Turner, Critical Youth Theory: Toward the Abolition of Infantilization and Adultification Under Law, https://www.criticalyouththeory.‌org/ [https://perma.cc/WM7R-WPP9] (last visited Aug. 22, 2024); Kia Turner, Darion Wallace, Danielle Miles-Langaigne & Essence Deras, Toward Black Abolition Theory Within Radical Abolition Studies: Upending Practices, Structures, and Epistemes of Domination, 18 J. Multicultural Educ. 275 (2024) (critiquing the epistemic domination of marginalized communities across generations and calling for new interdisciplinary practices).Show More The Essay closes with a series of questions on which future co-authors of YPLS should reflect as they work to prefigure multiracial, intergenerational, and radically democratic arrangements in the legal academy.

  1.  K-Sue Park, The History Wars and Property Law: Conquest and Slavery as Foundational to the Field, 131 Yale L.J. 1062, 1067 (2022) (“The predominant understanding of U.S. law and legal institutions, most simply, is built on a narrative from which the histories of colonization and enslavement—and the ways they shaped the evolution of racial dynamics in this country—have been erased over time.”). ↑
  2.  Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, This Is Not a Drill: The War Against Antiracist Teaching in America, 68 UCLA L. Rev.
    1702

    , 1725 (2022) (“[T]he relationship between authoritarian tyranny and white supremacy make it abundantly clear that there is no daylight between attacks on democracy and attacks on antiracism.”). ↑

  3.  “Young” refers broadly to people between the ages of 12–24 years old—the age band when youth have increased capacity for advocacy. See Daniel J. Siegel, Brainstorm: The Power and Purpose of the Teenage Brain
    6–9

    (2013) (explaining how adolescence spans across the ages of 12–24 years old, during which the frontal cortex develops and people present a higher proclivity for novelty, risk, social cohesion, and intense emotions). The Supreme Court has assumed this interpretation of prefrontal cortex development for youth under the age of 18. See Roper v. Simmons, 543 U.S. 551, 569–71, 578 (2005) (banning the death penalty for minors); Graham v. Florida, 560 U.S. 48, 68, 82 (2010) (banning sentences of mandatory life imprisonment without parole for minors convicted of crimes other than homicide); Miller v. Alabama, 567 U.S. 460, 471–72, 489 (2012) (banning sentences of mandatory life imprisonment without parole for minors convicted of homicide). ↑

  4.  Lani Guinier & Gerald Torres, Changing the Wind: Notes Toward a Demosprudence of Law and Social Movements, 123 Yale L.J. 2740, 2745–46 n.12 (2014) (explaining how social movements have created “both constituencies of accountability and alternative and authoritative interpretative communities”). ↑
  5.  See generally Sarah Medina Camiscoli, Teenage Rebels and the Demand for Due Process, Geo. J.L. & Mod. Critical Race Persps. (forthcoming 2024) (on file with authors) [hereinafter Medina Camiscoli, Teenage Rebels] (recounting the demosprudence of young women, enslaved youth, kidnapped indigenous youth, immigrant youth, and gender expansive youth). See also Sarah Medina Camiscoli, Youth Movement Law: The Case for Interpreting the Constitution with Mobilized Youth, 26 U. Pa. J. Const. L. (forthcoming 2024) (manuscript at 9, 52–53) (on file with authors) [hereinafter Medina Camiscoli, Youth Movement Law] (discussing the strategies of transgender and gender expansive youth leaders to pursue abolition, a Constitution of positive rights, and radical forms of direct democracy). ↑
  6.  The Participatory Law Scholarship movement has illuminated the harms of excluding marginalized peoples’ voices in legal knowledge productions. See Rachel López & Terrell Carter, If Lived Experience Could Speak: A Legal Method for Repairing Epistemic Violence in Law & the Legal Academy, 109 Minn. L. Rev. (forthcoming 2024) (manuscript at 4), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4741795 [https://perma.cc/MRB5-YT‌JU] (“[A]cademics often evoke the stories of [marginalized] communities without asking them what they think is best for them or making them the authors of their own stories. Then, their extracted stories are guarded behind paywalls inaccessible to them and in some instances, as will be detailed below, used against them as a matter of law.” (footnote omitted)). See generally Rachel López, Participatory Law Scholarship, 123 Colum. L. Rev. 1795 (2023) (describing the theory and practice of Participatory Law Scholarship). ↑
  7.  Todd Andrlik, How Old Were the Leaders of the American Revolution on July 4, 1776?, Slate (Aug. 20, 2013, 5:30 AM), https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2013/08/how-old-were-the-founding-fathers-the-leaders-of-the-american-revolution-were-younger-than-we-imagine‌.html [https://perma.cc/L38F-AR‌F9]; see also John S.C. Abbot, Lives of the Presidents of the United States of America, From Washington to the Present Time

    210 (Portland, H. Hallett & Co. 1879) (“[T]he first time [Andrew Jackson] took part in active service [was at fourteen years old] . . . . Andrew and his brother were taken prisoners. A British officer ordered him to brush his mud-spattered boots, I am a prisoner of war, not your servant,’ was the reply of the dauntless boy.”); c.f. Joseph Fishkin, Weightless Votes, 121 Yale L.J. 1888, 1904 (2012) (“‘[T]he framers were aware that this apportionment and representation base would include categories of persons who were ineligible to vote—women, children, bound servants, convicts, the insane, and, at a later time, aliens.’” (quoting Garza v. County of Los Angeles, 918 F.2d 763, 774 (9th Cir. 1990)); Julian Roberts-Grmela, A Seat Without A Voice: Student School Board Members Have No Voting Power, Chalkbeat (Jan. 24, 2023, 3:14 PM), https://www.ch‌alkbeat.org/newyork/2023/1/24/23569203/nyc-school-board-panel-for-educational-policy-st‌udent-power/ [https://perma.cc/M3AX-YHYA] (featuring students who deal with the “hard lesson” that students cannot vote on the school board even if they win a seat, which further elevates the disconnect between policies and their realities). ↑

  8.  See Douglas R. Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802, at 20, 45, 48, 165, 168 (1993); Darrell A.H. Miller, Estoppel by Nonviolence, 85 Law & Contemp. Probs. 69, 73 (2022) (“In 1800, a blacksmith named Gabriel, [enslaved] by a planter named Prosser, planned a multiracial republican revolution against slavery and merchant oppression in Henrico County, Virginia.”); Dorothy E. Roberts, Foreword: Abolition Constitutionalism, 133 Harv. L. Rev. 1, 63–64 (2019) (“The abolitionist Constitution was forged, as well, by ordinary black folks who abandoned plantations, served in the Union Army, and demanded recognition of their equal citizenship.”). ↑
  9.  See Roberts, supra note 8, at 63–64. ↑
  10.  Robert M. Utley, The Last Sovereigns: Sitting Bull and the Resistance of the Free Lakotas 3 (2020); B.J. Jones, Welcoming Tribal Courts into the Judicial Fraternity: Emerging Issues in Tribal-State and Tribal-Federal Court Relations, 24 Wm. Mitchell L. Rev. 457, 514 n.255 (1998) (recognizing that “[a]lthough Sitting Bull was not a jurist in the English common law sense,” his people called on him to mediate governance disputes and resist injustice regarding indigenous sovereignty). ↑
  11.  Guinier & Torres, supra note 4, at 2799 (“Without the MFDP, without SNCC, without the march from Selma to Montgomery, there would have been no Voting Rights Act in 1965 . . . . Similarly, without the UFW—and its capacity to organize allies across the country . . . there would have been no Agricultural Labor Relations Act (ALRA) in California.”). ↑
  12.  Erica Chenoweth, Zoe Marks, Matthew Cebul & Miranda Rivers, Youth and LGBTQ+ Participation in Nonviolent Action, USAID (Jan. 2023), https://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PA00‌ZSDF.pdf [https://perma.cc/E42J-SHA8] (finding more nonviolent protest activities than ever before, which also include a greater number of LGBTQ+ and youth participants). ↑
  13.  See Medina Camiscoli, Youth Movement Law, supra note 5 (manuscript at 8) (arguing that “mobilized youth play an essential role in transforming the present ‘political crisis’ into an opportunity to reimagine American democracy” (citations omitted)); Jack M. Balkin, The Cycles of Constitutional Time 44 (2020) (arguing that the United States is experiencing constitutional rot and defining constitutional decay or rot as “[w]hen a republic . . . loses its connection to the joint pursuit of the public good”). ↑
  14.  Mass shootings present an enormous public health crisis, as they constitute the number one cause of death of children in the United States. James G. Hodge, Jr., Erica N. White, Rebecca Freed & Nora Wells, Supreme Court Impacts in Public Health Law: 2021–2022, 50 J.L. Med. & Ethics 608, 610 (2022) (“Extending Second Amendment rights to include general self-defense outside the home threatens a multitude of public health regulations aimed at reducing firearm-related morbidity and mortality as Congress ponders federal legislative limits after multiple acts of gun violence in Buffalo, Uvalde (TX), and other locales in 2022.”); see also German Lopez, It’s Official: March for Our Lives Was One of the Biggest Youth Protests Since the Vietnam War, Vox (Mar. 26, 2018, 10:10 AM), https://www.vox.com/polic‌y-and-politics/2018/3/26/17160646/march-for-our-lives-crowd-size-count [https://perma.cc/‌Y8BN-MKHQ] (detailing how March for Our Lives included over 1.2 million people nationwide and was “one of the biggest rallies for gun control ever in the nation’s capital”); Fordham L. Ctr. on Race, L. & Just., Youth Power Not Guns, Vimeo (Oct. 25, 2023), https://vi‌meo.com/884009211 [https://perma.cc/XN8Q-ADS6]. ↑
  15.  The United States still incarcerates more young people than any other country in the world. See Alec Karakatsanis, The Punishment Bureaucracy: How to Think About “Criminal Justice Reform,” 128 Yale L.J.F. 848, 849–50 (2019) (using the term “human caging” to de-normalize the mass incarceration crisis in the United States). See generally Peer Def. Project, Abolish New York City’s Youth Punishment Systems (2023) (Anna Milliken & Kailyn Gaines eds.), https://acrobat.adobe.com/link/review?uri=urn:aaid:scds:US:df106b9c-53a8-34‌f4-97bc‌-206923b41449 [https://perma.cc/K2PX-PYJ4] (a youth-authored guide to the legal systems and history of punishing and caging of young people in New York City). See also Matthew Clair & Amanda Woog, Courts and the Abolition Movement, 110 Calif. L. Rev. 1, 7 (2022) (describing how the movement for abolition has impacted the court system through “(1) power shifting, (2) defunding and reinvesting, and (3) transformation”). ↑
  16.  “Six in ten each of Millennials and Gen Z see climate change as a critical threat to U.S. interests.” Emily Sullivan, Millennials and Gen Z Sound the Alarm on Climate Change, Chi. Council on Glob. Affs. (Jan. 18, 2023), https://globalaffairs.org/commentary-and-analysis/bl‌ogs/millennials-and-gen-z-sound-alarm-climate-change [https://perma.cc/6ZHV-AK8G]; see Camila Bustos, Movement Lawyering in the Time of the Climate Crisis, 39 Pace Env’t L. Rev. 1, 17 (2022) (describing Juliana v. United States, 947 F.3d 1159 (9th Cir. 2020), as “a groundbreaking case where a group of youth plaintiffs filed a constitutional climate lawsuit to challenge the federal government’s actions causing climate change, alleging violations to their right to life, liberty, and property”). ↑
  17.  Larry Buchanan, Quoctrung Bui & Jugal K. Patel, Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement in U.S. History, N.Y. Times (July 3, 2020), https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2‌020/07/03/us/george-floyd-protests-crowd-size.html [https://perma.cc/7F6Z-ZPHK]; see Rashawn Ray, Black Lives Matter at 10 Years: 8 Ways the Movement Has Been Highly Effective, Brookings (Oct. 12, 2022), https://www.brookings.edu/articles/black-lives-matter-at-10-years-what-impact-has-it-had-on-policing/ [https://perma.cc/5N9K-3UW6] (explaining how Black Lives Matter transformed laws and policies around the United States). ↑
  18.  Young workers and mobilized students transformed the landscape of the labor movement. See Leanna First-Arai, Young Workers Are Bridging the Climate and Labor Movements, Teen Vogue (July 25, 2022), https://www.teenvogue.com/story/young-workers-labor-movement [https://perma.cc/4498-P7QT]; see also Zeynep Biyikli, Students Leverage Their University Affiliation to Gain Ground in the Fight Against Starbucks’s Union-Busting Efforts, 49 Hum. Rts. 36, 36 (2023) (“[U]niversity students across the country have reconsidered their school’s financial relationships with one of the most prolific union-busters in modern history.”). ↑
  19.  Sylvia R. Lazos Vargas, The Immigrant Rights Marches (Las Marchas): Did the “Gigante” (Giant) Wake Up or Does It Still Sleep Tonight?, 7 Nev. L.J. 780, 788, 790 (2007) (noting the 2006 Los Angeles protest of La Gran Marcha as the largest demonstration for immigrant rights in U.S. history, where “[s]tudents staged ‘walkouts’ for three consecutive days following ‘la Gran Marcha.’”). ↑
  20.  See Medina Camiscoli, Youth Movement Law, supra note 5 (manuscript at 59–77) (outlining over eighty youth organizations resisting laws that target gender expansive youth). ↑
  21.  See generally Medina Camiscoli, Teenage Rebels, supra note 5 (elevating the demosprudence of youth movement leaders in Students Engaged in Advancing Texas (“SEAT”) coalition fighting book bans in and outside of legal institutions). ↑
  22.  Months before the Supreme Court struck down constitutional protections for abortion, youth movement leaders began building mutual aid networks to protect access. See Christine Mui, “Thanks for Hating, It Helps the Movement”: How a 19 Year Old Used Her Internet Trolls to Raise $2 Million for Abortion Access in Less Than a Week, Fortune (Aug. 6, 2022, 6:00 AM), https://fortune.com/2022/08/06/teenager-fundraiser-abortion-access-gen-z-2-milli‌on [https://perma.cc/PCU5-ZQDG]; Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Org., 142 S. Ct. 2228, 2284–85 (2022) (abolishing the constitutional right to abortion and allowing states to make independent decisions about regulating abortion access). ↑
  23.  Young tenants have organized across communities and college campuses to demand a right to housing in the midst of a housing crisis. See, Youth All. For Hous., About, https://www.y4h.org/about [https://perma.cc/A2UJ-CK9C] (last visited Oct. 13, 2024) (“[E]nvision[ing] a world where housing is de-commodified, houselessness does not exist, and everyone is guaranteed a safe, quality, and permanently affordable home.”); Jonathan Franklin, Howard University Students Reach an Agreement with Officials After a Month of Protest, NPR (Nov. 15, 2021, 8:12 PM), https://www.npr.org/2021/11/15/1055929172/howar‌d-university-students-end-protest-housing-agreement [https://perma.cc/5E5U-US42] (describing how students protested uninhabitable housing conditions on Howard University’s campus); John Infranca, The New State Zoning: Land Use Preemption Amid A Housing Crisis, 60 B.C. L. Rev. 823, 829 (2019) (“The breadth and depth of the housing crisis in communities throughout the country has made housing affordability a salient issue for a broader swath of the population.”). ↑
  24.  See López, supra note 6, at 1798 (“[Participatory Law Scholarship] also involves another profoundly human element, one that is fundamental to the ethos and epistemology of Participatory Law Scholarship: camaraderie.”). ↑
  25.  See generally Mariame Kaba & Shira Hassan, Fumbling Towards Repair: A Workbook for Community Accountability Facilitators (2019) (providing tips and educational materials to community accountability facilitators). See also I. India Thusi, Book Review, Feminist Scripts for Punishment, 134 Harv. L. Rev. 2449, 2480 (2021) (discussing Mariame Kaba and Shira Hassan’s workbook Fumbling Towards Repair, “which provides facilitation guidance on responding to harm and encouraging people who inflict harm to take responsibility”). ↑
  26.  See López, supra note 6, at 1800; see also id. (“PLS “shifts power to people who are not lawyers, establishing them as experts in their own legal realities . . . push[ing] the boundaries of how society and the legal academy understand their interventions.”). ↑
  27.  Id. at 1801. ↑
  28.  See The HLS Conference Organizers, Critical Race Theory: Inside and Beyond the Ivory Tower, 69 UCLA L. Rev. Disc. (Law Meets World) 118, 126–27 (2022) (arguing that the recent surge in “anti-CRT” legislation targeted at schools is an example of epistemicide and recognizing that law school spaces fail to critique the “dominant epistemics of law”); see also López & Carter, supra note 6 (manuscript at 36) (defining “academic silencing” as “using the tools at academics’ disposal to suppress or alter [marginalized] knowledge” and observing that “[l]egal academics regularly speak for the marginalized, articulating how the law could better serve them, but rarely ceding space or resources so that the subaltern can speak for themselves”). ↑
  29.  Legal scholars have argued that legal academia emboldens racial capitalism when historically marginalized people or ideas are included in university spaces to extract value from those marginalized people or ideas for the institution. See Nancy Leong, Racial Capitalism, 126 Harv. L. Rev. 2151, 2171–72 (2013) (arguing that diversity has historically been sanctioned when privileged, White people in the academy decide they can derive social or economic value from nonwhiteness). ↑
  30.  See López & Carter, supra note 6 (manuscript at 23) (“We employ the term legal smothering to describe when the subaltern silences themselves either because the law prevents them from speaking for themselves or only recognizes testimony that aligns with the dominant discourse in law.”). See generally Guinier & Torres, supra note 4 (elevating the extra-judicial interpretations of law of social movements as a legitimate interpretation of law). See also Medina Camiscoli, Youth Movement Law, supra note 5 (manuscript at 7) (explaining how gender expansive youth “and their families have fled hostile states to escape skyrocketing rates of harassment, hate crimes, criminalization, suicide, and other efforts to eradicate trans people from public life” such as bans on books, community organizations, and families where young people can exercise their right to bodily autonomy); Benjamin C. Park, Rishub K. Das & Brian C. Drolet, Increasing Criminalization of Gender-Affirming Care for Transgender Youths—A Politically Motivated Crisis, 175
    JAMA P

    ediatrics

    1205, 1205 (2021) (discussing how laws that criminalize gender-affirming care have serious and negative health impacts on transgender and gender expansive youth). ↑

  31.  Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide 93 (2014) (defining “humane governance” of knowledge as one that “‘facilitates communication across . . . nationalist, ethnic, class, generational, cognitive, and gender divides,’ but does so with ‘respect and celebration of difference and an attitude of extreme skepticism toward exclusivist alarms that deny space for expression and exploration of others’” (quoting Richard Falk, On Humane Governance: Toward a New Global Politics 242 (1995))). The authors acknowledge the recent allegations of sexual misconduct by young, femme academics against Boaventura de Sousa Santos and assert that sexual misconduct in the academy perpetuates its own kind of epistemic injustice. See Lieselotte Viaene, Catarina Laranjeiro & Miye Nadya Tom, The Walls Spoke When No One Else Would, in Sexual Misconduct in Academia: Informing an Ethics of Care in the University 208, 208–23 (Erin Pritchard & Delyth Edwards eds., 2003) (detailing the authors’ experiences of sexual harassment at an unnamed institution where they were formerly Ph.D. students or postdoctoral researchers and its impact on knowledge production); see also Mariama Correia, Brazilian State Deputy Says She Was Sexually Assaulted by Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Publica (Apr. 14, 2023, 5:55 PM), https://apublica.org/2023/04/brazilian-state-deputy-says-she-was-sexual‌ly-assaulted-by-boaventura-de-sousa-santos/ [https://perma.cc/GY8W-ENST] (providing further information on the sexual assault allegations against Sousa Santos). Throughout the remainder of the paper, the authors make efforts to cite interpretations of epistemic violence by women legal academics in solidarity with the movement to investigate the alleged sexual misconduct and elevate the jurisprudence of marginalized women in legal academia. ↑
  32.  López, supra note 6, at 1827–29 (describing that the two principles that undergird equitable partnerships in the co-author model are critical self-reflection and combating academic institutionalization). ↑
  33.  See Guinier & Torres, supra note 4, at 2756–57 (explaining how activist movements in American history “forge[d] new understandings of the status quo . . . [by] creating an alternative narrative of constitutional meaning”); see also Kempis Songster, Rachel López & Gerald Torres, Participatory Law Scholarship as Demosprudence, 110 Va. L. Rev. Online 298 (2024) (discussing how PLS provides a powerful methodology to democratize the law and legal scholarship and improve democratic institutions). ↑
  34.  See Guinier & Torres, supra note 4, at 2750; see also López & Carter, supra note 6 (manuscript at 6) (arguing that “PLS should be seen as reparation for ongoing epistemic violence at the hands of academics and academic institutions”). ↑
  35.  See Amanda Alexander, Nurturing Freedom Dreams: An Approach to Movement Lawyering in the Black Lives Matter Era, 5 How. Hum. & Civ. Rts. L. Rev. 101, 10 2, 123 (2021) (discussing how lawyers are not trained to encourage freedom dreams). ↑
  36.  Jonathan Gingerich, Democratic Vibes, 32 Wm. & Mary Bill Rts. J. 1135, 1138 (2024); id. at 1152 (“As the Black Panther Party put it, ‘All Power to the People!’” (citing 7eventytimes7, All Power to the People!—The Black Panther Party and Beyond, YouTube (June 8, 2016), https://youtu.be/pKvE6_s0jy0 [https://perma.cc/2UNU-2G8H])). ↑
  37.  See Guinier & Torres, supra note 4, at 2803–04 (discussing how the resistance and legal interpretation of grassroots movements have enhanced democracy through the passage of new laws, shifts in jurisprudence, and changes in public opinion). ↑
  38.  UCLA Sch. of L. Critical Race Stud., CRT Forward, https://crtforward.law.ucla.‌edu/ [https://perma.cc/7KEK-DG8Q] (last visited Aug. 21, 2024); Jonathan Friedman & Nadine Farid Johnson, Banned in the USA: The Growing Movement to Censor Books in Schools, PEN America (Sept. 19, 2022), https://pen.org/report/banned-usa-growing-movement-to-cens‌or-books-in-schools/ [https://perma.cc/G8CC-EL8P]. ↑
  39.  See López & Carter, supra note 6 (manuscript at 48–50). ↑
  40.  See López, supra note 6, at 1827–29 (identifying strategies such as fostering critical self-reflection and combatting academic institutionalization as critical to the process of developing PLS partnerships and projects). ↑
  41.  Specifically, the two situate their practice within Sameer Ashar’s theory of prefigurative pedagogy, arguing that Youth Participatory Scholarship offers a potent practice of prefigurative pedagogy where marginalized and mobilized youth—those with limited to no levers to participate in democracy or resist authoritarianism—disrupt the gatekeeping of legal knowledge that justifies their exclusion. See generally Sameer M. Ashar, Pedagogy of Prefiguration, 132 Yale L.J.F. 869 (2023) (arguing that lawyers should experiment with social analysis, radical imagination, and dialogical relationship with collaborators to prefigure utopian social arrangements with social movement organizations). ↑
  42.  Id. at 871 n.8 (citing Prefiguring Border Justice: Interview with Harsha Walia, 6 Critical Ethnic Stud. (Nov. 27, 2019), https://manifold.umn.edu/read/prefiguring-border-justice-inter‌view-with-harsha-walia [https://perma.cc/6MCM-NDXT]). ↑
  43.  See also Ruth Levitas, Utopia as Method 5–6 (2013); Balkin, supra note 13, at 44 (arguing that the United States is experiencing constitutional rot and defining constitutional decay or rot as “[w]hen a republic . . . loses its connection to the joint pursuit of the public good”); Jack M. Balkin, A Symposium on Jack M. Balkin’s The Cycles of Constitutional Time: How to Do Constitutional Theory While Your House Burns Down, 101 B.U. L. Rev. 1723, 1756 (2021) (“Constitutional rot refers to the processes by which governments become increasingly less democratic and less republican. Rot is endemic to republics. A long tradition of political thought holds that republics are delicate institutions that are easily corrupted and hard to keep going. The people lose civic virtue, the institutions break down, and the norms of trust that are necessary for multiparty competition decay.”); id. at 1759 (“Issues of race, culture, religion, and identity have only made the problems worse. Over the course of four decades, the Republican Party increasingly has become a White person’s party, and politicians have used issues of race, culture, religion, and identity to motivate the Party’s base of White voters.”). ↑
  44.  John Wall, Adultism and Voting Age Discrimination, 36 Harv. Hum. Rts. J. 327, 328 (2023) (“A first step toward a systemic understanding of adultism can be found in . . . [c]hildren’s mistreatment—for example, their being subject to physical punishment, being banned from public spaces, and lack of real voices in schools—is underwritten by the cultural acceptance of an in-built adult-child hierarchy. In . . . the political sphere, ‘adultism refers to all the behaviors and attitudes that flow from the assumption that adults are better than young people, and are entitled to act upon young people in many ways without their agreement.’ This concept of a deep-seated disrespect toward children locates the problem in broad systems of historical preconception.” (quoting Barry Checkoway, Adults as Allies, Partnerships/Community, 1996, at 14)); see also Sarah Medina Camiscoli, Paige Duggins-Clay, Maryam Salmanova & Ibtihal Chamakh, Youth Dignity Takings: How Book and Trans Bans Take Youth Property and Dignity, 1 Loy. Interdisc. J. Pub. Int. L. 1, 75 (2024) (“Adultism legitimizes the belief that Young People are inferior to adults. Adultism further justifies disregarding the contributions of Young People and excluding Youth as decision makers in their communities. Adultism vindicates attorneys who relegate Youth to periphery positions in the legal workplace as interns or community volunteers, where they will often bear the brunt of busy work or outreach for little-to-no compensation.” (footnotes omitted)). ↑
  45.  Guinier & Torres, supra note 4, at 2746 n.12 (“Democracy-enhancing social change reminds us that genuine communities of consent are what justify democracy.” (emphasis added)). ↑
  46.  See Medina Camiscoli et al., supra note 44, at 74–75. ↑
  47.  Leong, supra note 29, at 2153 n.7. ↑
  48.  See generally Medina Camiscoli, Youth Movement Law, supra note 5 (arguing for the elevation and inclusion of marginalized youths’ experiences in constitutional interpretation). ↑

  49.  See generally Sarah Medina Camiscoli & Kia Turner, Critical Youth Theory: Toward the Abolition of Infantilization and Adultification Under Law, https://www.criticalyouththeory.‌org/ [https://perma.cc/WM7R-WPP9] (last visited Aug. 22, 2024); Kia Turner, Darion Wallace, Danielle Miles-Langaigne & Essence Deras, Toward Black Abolition Theory Within Radical Abolition Studies: Upending Practices, Structures, and Epistemes of Domination, 18 J. Multicultural Educ. 275 (2024) (critiquing the epistemic domination of marginalized communities across generations and calling for new interdisciplinary practices). ↑

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