GERALD P. LÓPEZ
Professor of Law Emeritus,
University of California at Los Angeles

In 1975, with Tom Adler, Roy Cazares and Napoleon Jones, Gerald P. López formed a radical storefront law firm in San Diego. From 1985 to 1994, he helped launch the Lawyering for Social Change Concentration at Stanford University. In 2003, he founded the Center for Community Problem Solving in New York City. He has served on the law faculties of NYU, Stanford, Harvard, California Western, and UCLA.

López’s practice, teaching, and writing express what his 1992 book calls Rebellious Lawyering – One Chicano’s Vision of Progressive Practice. Aiming to supplant the top-down, experts-rule practice dominant across professions and social life, López insists lawyers can and should work with clients, communities, and movements as co-eminent problem-solving practitioners – as collaborating equals confronting tiny to huge challenges through relationships and strategies prefiguring the very transformed world they aim to achieve.

In all his work, López aims to describe the realities of life governed by White Supremacist and authoritarian regimes (across the globe and within constitutional democracies), the experiences of those communities targeted as genetically and culturally sub-human (by the bipartisan mainstream as much as by the far right), and the capacity of these subordinated communities to cope, resist, and occasionally alter life.

If we can come to appreciate that everyone can teach us, López has stressed, we can always find others — from nearby to afar — demonstrating that we can stand up to and sometimes take down godlike bullies and invincible networks. We can always discover people and coalitions embodying the radically egalitarian and accountable life that otherwise can feel hopelessly beyond our reach.

López’s rebellious vision has inspired many to fundamentally alter lawyering and legal education — and the institutional structures and cultures shaping life — in the United States, Australia, India, Scotland, Bangladesh, Italy, Mexico, Canada, Haiti, Guatemala, the UK, and across transnational communities.