Law & Liberation

In 1989, a group of students at Yale Law School formed the Yale Journal of Law & Liberation (YJLL) to fill a pressing need: the formation of a clear institutional location for progressive scholarship, activism, and connection between law students and communities most marginalized by the law. The "current atmosphere of legal thought" at elite law schools, the editors noted in their inaugural edition, "lacks a meaningful appreciation of the function of law in legitimating existing relations of power and social domination" as well as "any consideration of the prospects for realigning those social relations of power." Existing law journals and student organizations, they further explained, "do not adequately address the fundamental socioeconomic violence of the system" because they do not "provide a forum for those who are voiceless in the dominant legal culture" (J. L. & Liberation ix, 1989).

The principal goal of the YJLL, then, was to intervene into the current state of affairs by offering an inclusive, cross-disciplinary space for progressive and leftist students, academics, legal practitioners, and movement organizers to craft new modes of legal analysis and offer innovative frameworks for leveraging law to achieve more just socioeconomic outcomes. Crucially, the Journal sought to do so by giving a voice to those often omitted from contemporary legal discourse otherwise, such as political prisoners, unhoused persons, and activists engaging in legal reform work who do not have formal legal training.