Fighting for an Equal Place: Legal Mobilization in a City—and Democracy—Under Siege

I wrote An Equal Place: Lawyers in the Struggle for Los Angeles to examine how contemporary movement lawyers built new legal regimes from the ground up to challenge economic inequality and promote immigrant worker power in America’s second-largest city. I did much of the research for the book—which included interviewing sixty-six key actors, building an archive of movement documents, and compiling detailed court and legislative records—during the Obama years, when Los Angeles was at the center of a wider resurgence of progressive social movement activism and innovative thinking about how to revitalize the labor movement after decades of retrogression. I did much of the final writing during a darker period: the unexpected first term of President Donald Trump, when writing felt like an act of resistance and the country seemed like it could still thwart twin infestations: Covid and the pestilence of Trumpism. I published the book as the Trump effort to overturn the 2020 election had just failed, and the nation walked back from a dangerous precipice.