For The Next Four Years, It’s [Progressive Legal] Infrastructure Week

Molly Coleman on the movement-building work ahead.

Molly Coleman is a co-founder and the Executive Director of People’s Parity Project, “a movement of law students and attorneys organizing for a democratized legal system which empowers working people and opposes subordination in any form.”

For the first time in the 21st century, the last four years started to show what it might look like if we filled the government with people who think the law should work for working people.

At Joe Biden’s direction, the Department of Education was tasked with cancelling $20,000 of student debt for all Pell Grant recipients and $10,000 for all other student loan borrowers. When the Supreme Court blocked this from going into effect, the Department still managed to cancel over $180 billion in student loan debt for over five million people.

Under Lina Khan, the Federal Trade Commission worked to free workers from coercive contracts that kept them stuck in bad jobs; blocked corporate mergers that would hurt consumers; and enacted basic consumer-protection policies like the “click-to-cancel” rule aimed at preventing businesses from making it nearly impossible to end subscriptions and memberships.

Rohit Chopra’s Consumer Finance Protection Bureau set out to reduce the “junk fees” that cost Americans billions of dollars every year. In doing so, the CFPB used its rulemaking authority to cap credit card late fees, limit banks’ ability to charge overdraft fees, and more.

Thanks largely to the work of Jennifer Abruzzo, the Democratic majority on the National Labor Relations Board reaffirmed the right of graduate student workers to unionize, ended captive audience meetings, and made it easier for workers to form a union when their employers commit unfair labor practices.

Under Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter’s leadership, the antitrust division of the Department of Justice was the most active it had been in decades. The division effectively revived Section Two of the Sherman Act, and in doing so scored major wins for workers and consumers against companies like Google that aimed to illegally monopolize the marketplace.

For four years, there was a concerted effort to improve the material conditions of working people led by a generation of progressive lawyers in the executive branch. And yet, despite all these efforts, working people are still getting screwed.

This is, in part, because the work of undoing generations of neoliberal policies is not a four-year project, but one that will take decades—if we’re lucky. It’s also, of course, because the courts blocked many agency efforts to advance economic justice, and because progressive economic thinkers in the White House and the administrative state didn’t have enough allies in Congress.

The throughline to these obstacles, in my estimation? We haven’t had enough lawyers who stand on the side of working people. In short, we’ve had individual champions of economic justice in key positions, and that’s been enough to get some big wins—but we haven’t had a true legal movement capable of doing the deep, long-term work of building a legal system that works for working people.

Over the next four years, progressive lawyers—lawyers in the tradition of Louis Brandeis, after whom this blog is named—are not going to be ascendent, to put it mildly. The silver lining in this? We have four years to build that movement, and to create the legal infrastructure necessary to ensure that four (and eight, and twelve, and on, and on) years from now, we have the legal power necessary to build a new economy facilitated by a legal system that serves the people, not capital.

Foundational to the work ahead must be the development of a shared, comprehensive framework for how we build power for working people in the law when the design of our government is meant to slow down our ability to act on behalf of the people. We have too many veto points that prevent the people from getting the policies that they want. This problem has been exacerbated by a Supreme Court hell-bent on taking power for itself, enabled by a legal profession that recognizes that turning the courts into the ultimate policy-making bodies in the country is good for lawyers’ bottom line. The so-called “major questions doctrine” has been pulled out of thin air by Supreme Court justices to ensure that any executive action that would make a meaningful difference in people’s lives can be struck down by elite judges whose interest in maintaining the status quo of economic inequality runs deep.

Given these realities, our movement can’t focus solely on ways to leverage the law and the legal system as is to build power for working people. Instead, we must understand systemic democracy reform as the other side of that same coin. Having a plan for both the advancement of economic justice and the structural reform that we’ll need in order for that economic justice to truly become real for Americans is necessary to doing our work well, and accomplishing what we know must be accomplished.

In doing this work and laying the foundations for both economic and democracy reform, we must commit to not recreating problems too often caused by the legal profession. Elite lawyers don’t have all the answers to how to make our economy more just, and aren’t the only ones with a vested interest in reforming the structures of our democracy. If we truly want to build a society in which the people, not corporations or wealthy elites, are on top, we need to start by making our government more participatory, so that the people can chart the course for our collective future. This starts by ensuring that our reform agenda for four or eight years from now does not further concentrate power in the hands of a few lawyers. Having a more benevolent set of lawyers, be they judges or government regulators, wielding power would be an improvement over having neoliberal corporate Democrats—or worse—wielding that power, but our true goal must be to ensure that the people have power in all spaces, from the marketplace to the government that regulates that marketplace. This will require lawyers willing to cede some of their power in the interest of the public—and that’s a good thing.

While lawyers won’t be alone in bringing about the change that we need, we know that they will play an important role in moving our country down the right path. As we build a comprehensive agenda for the full set of reforms that we will need, it’s critical that we prioritize bringing the next generation of legal leaders along with us.

That work starts with law students (or even before, as we ensure that people with shared values and vision choose to pursue law in the first place). It is the job of every single person who sees themselves as part of this collective movement to prioritize building the people. We need to identify and support not just the next Lina Khans and Rohit Chopras, but all of the lawyers who will fill future government offices.

Law school in many instances serves to prevent aspiring lawyers from acquiring the skills and experiences that they most need in order to do this work well, so it’s our job to support law students in learning what it means to use the law to get to yes, not who see it as their job to trim the sails of economic justice reformers; to help them find jobs at a moment when the temptations to go into the corporate legal world are often greater than ever; and to help them build the community that will both help them and hold them accountable in doing work that will make the world better.

Building this pipeline has to include investing in students beyond a handful of elite schools, and it requires recognizing that there are more than a few “unicorn” jobs in which people can contribute to creating a more just economic order. The basic ethos represented by the very best of the regulators from the Biden era—the idea that the government can build an economy that works for the many, not the few—needs to be shared by lawyers in all parts of the country, working at all levels of government and in all corners of civil society. Yes, we need Jennifer Abruzzos, but we also need thousands of lawyers whose names will never be in the headlines, but who will find creative ways to do the day-in and day-out work of fighting for comprehensive economic justice at all levels.

The scale of the harm that the current administration is poised to cause is nearly unfathomable. That means that, as we build the pipeline of people who have a shared vision, we must ensure that these lawyers understand what the assignment will be from day one in their roles, whether that’s in Congress, at the state or local level or in nonprofits, or in other sectors of civil society over the next four years, or as part of the executive branch in four or eight years. The speed with which the Trump administration has enacted the plans laid out in Project 2025 lays down a marker for the progressive movement. We must be prepared to operate with the same speed and do the legwork in advance to ensure that we’re ready to quickly make life meaningfully better for people whenever we next have the opportunity.

Movement building is hard. It requires more than identifying problems or having good ideas about solving them. It requires deepening our analysis of why economic justice persists; understanding what that means about the scale of the necessary reforms and committing the uphill fights we’ll need to get those reforms; relinquishing ego and savior complexes; and bringing people into the work at the scale that will be needed to actually address the problems we face. For lawyers, the concept of building and joining movements can be uncomfortable—it’s a bit at odds with the idea that one person alone can litigate the case that will save the world. But when we face a crisis of inequality like the one in front of us, it’s our responsibility to get comfortable, to think differently, and to do the work that is needed in order for us to win.