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understanding of the nature of the judicial process constituted a complete reformation of the concept of law. Whereas New York law at the outset of the century had been the embodiment of precedents preserving the existing distribution of wealth and established standards of morality, law after midcentury became the process by which judges decided how to balance the majority’s vision of social justice against the liberty, dignity, and rights of minorities. This reformation of law would spawn dramatic changes in legal doctrine, which, in turn, would lead to significant social change. *** Armed with their powerful ideology and freed from the fetters of precedent, New York’s judges rewrote the state’s common law and constitutional law. By empowering religion, they uplifted multitudes of Catholics and Jews. They also revolutionized contract law, tort law, the law of fiduciary duty, and the law regulating sexual expression and family relations. They
reordered the law of obscenity and thereby facilitated the introduction of sex into popular culture. Finally, they elaborated a new paradigm of regulation, which recognized the plenary power of government while simultaneously limiting its capacity to wreak injustice in individual cases. The legalist reformation also remade New York’s economy, society, and culture. As a movement with a primary goal of assimilating the Roman Catholic and Jewish descendants of turn-of-the-century immigrants into the mainstream of New York life, it totally succeeded. In the aftermath of World War II, Catholics and Jews abandoned their urban ghettos and raced into newly developed, integrated suburbs. Government also provided them with educational opportunities of increasingly high quality, and many took advantage. Most significantly, Catholics and Jews began to obtain jobs and gradually assume positions of command at the highest levels of the American economy.
The Immigrant Rights Clinic NYU Law’s Immigrant Rights Clinic (IRC), founded by Professors Nancy Morawetz and Michael Wishnie, represents individual immigrants and their organizations. On behalf of noncitizens, students enrolled in the clinic handle immigration, labor, employment, criminal, and civil rights cases in federal, state, and administrative courts. At the same time, students represent grassroots and national immigrant organizations in non-litigation advocacy, from legislative drafting to media initiatives and community education projects. Benita Jain (’03) came to NYU Law with a background in organizing and a strong desire to become a lawyer for social justice. “I knew that I wanted to use law for social change and that I wanted to remain connected to organizing,” Jain says. “The question for me was how the two could fit together responsibly.” The Immigrant Rights Clinic at NYU Law is designed to
address precisely that sort of question. This year, as a student in the IRC, Jain had the chance to work on cutting-edge litigation, as well as grassroots efforts to advance legislative change. Jain and Mina Park (’02), another IRC student, represented two garment workers, brothers who were arrested in an Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) raid of their
*** The legalist reformation did not, however, treat all groups equally well. African Americans remained victimized by segregation, racism, and discrimination, as did other newer immigrant groups from Asia and Latin America. In giving sexual and other freedom to men, the law often oppressed women, who in many ways were treated as second-class citizens from the 1940s into the 1960s. Finally, the legal system tended to repress anyone, especially the young, who either could not or would not assimilate into the existing cultural order and wished instead to create alternative cultures. By the late 1960s, these various groups perceived that the legalist reformation was not granting them freedom, equality, and dignity, and they burst into protest. With their protest, the unity of social and political vision that had enabled judges to stage a legal revolution in the aftermath of World War II broke apart into fragments in the closing years of the 1960s. ■
midtown factory and placed in deportation proceedings. Their cases were referred to the IRC by the brothers’ labor union, which frequently confronts employer threats to contact INS when workers organize to protect their rights. In November, and then again in April, Jain and Park appeared before an Immigration judge to argue that the proceedings must be terminated because INS had violated an agency rule restricting raids in the midst of a labor dispute. The students also moved to suppress all evidence obtained against their clients on the grounds that INS had engaged in anti-Latino racial profiling during the factory raid, singling out for questioning and arrest Latino workers from a multiethnic workforce. To build their clients’ case, Jain and Park demonstrated that the INS raid was instigated by a sweatshop boss in retaliation for his employees having filed overtime complaints with the state labor department. The students introduced into evidence an IRC statistical analysis of INS racial profiling in worksite raids, prepared by IRC student Jonathan Trutt (’01), and New York Times coverage of the IRC study (the study itself was based on data that had been obtained in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit,