Legal Scholarship for the Urban Core
From the Ground Up

The problems of entrenched poverty and economic underdevelopment in American urban cores involve multiple overlapping challenges that have stymied consistent and long-term progress for many decades. Although inadequate and misguided laws are not solely responsible for this state of affairs, good laws - and good lawyering - can contribute enormously to overcoming the challenges of the urban cores. By showcasing a range of scholarly analyses, covering a broad spectrum of legal issues and methodologies, this book demonstrates how law and lawyers can and do respond to the challenges of the urban cores. It provides paths forward at the local level in the face of federal political paralysis and inattention and lays a foundation for new paradigms and new approaches to intransigent problems. Modeling engaged legal scholarship as a pragmatic response to contemporary challenges, this book is for anyone concerned about the current state of American urban cores.

1. Introduction; Part I. Change on the Ground: Case Studies of Law Reform in Action: 2. The drive for economic justice at America's Port Scott Cummings; 3. Making good on the 'primacy of labor': a case study of democratic participation in a pioneering American cooperative Rashmi Dyal-Chand; Part II. Reimagining Law for the Urban Core: 4. Community development finance and economic justice Peter Pitegoff; 5. How to increase our affordable housing stock Robert Solomon; Part III. The Legal Academy and the Urban Core: 6. Focused ethnography: a methodological approach for engaged legal scholarship Tonya L. Brito, Daanika Gordon and David J. Pate, Jr; 7. Legal education, democracy, and the urban core Kathleen S. Morris; 8. Education and social justice: urban schools and law schools Peter Enrich; 9. Conclusion: legal scholarship from the ground up.

Peter Enrich is Professor of Law at the School of Law, Northeastern University, Boston. He is a leading authority on state and local government law and state and local tax policy, with a focus on issues of fiscal and interjurisdictional dynamics, including education funding and state tax policy.
Rashmi Dyal-Chand is Professor of Law at the School of Law, Northeastern University, Boston. She is the author of Collaborative Capitalism in American Cities: Reforming Urban Market Regulations (Cambridge, 2018) and her article, 'Human Worth as Collateral', won the 2006 Association of American Law Schools scholarly papers competition for new law teachers.