Cause Lawyers Against Urban Dispossession
I explore how cause lawyers assist urban poor communities in resisting their dispossession through alternative lawyering and rights-based litigation. In exploring this relationship, I triangulate an exploratory single case study design that mobilizes a combination of interview and archival data, with in-depth interviews of cause lawyers affiliated with various human rights groups. Specifically, I utilize a Supreme Court case that compelled government agencies in the Philippines to clean up the Manila Bay and, in so doing, demolish and evict informal settler homes and families living along its banks and its connected rivers, waterways, and esteros (i.e., creekside). Urban poor communities involved in this case received legal support from two Non-Governmental Organizations: Urban Poor Associates and the Sentro ng Alternatibong Lingap Panlegal (SALIGAN; Center for Alternative Lawyering). Both organizations share a long history of providing legal and organizational support to urban poor communities disadvantaged by the threat of displacement. Why were cause lawyers involved in the landmark Metropolitan Manila Development Authority v. Concerned Residents of Manila Bay successful in assisting some urban poor communities in resisting their dispossession through alternative lawyering and rights-based litigation, but not in others? What resources did they provide? How did they mobilize these resources? In what ways did they creatively mobilize jurisprudence to translate the urban poor’s interests and demands into legally-recognized rights? How did they influence the urban poor’s tactical repertoire of legal mobilization strategies? My paper broadly seeks to probe the relationship between the law and social change.