While many young people become lawyers for the big bucks, others are motivated by the pursuit of social justice, seeking to help people for whom legal services are financially, socially, or politically inaccessible. These progressive lawyers often bring a considerable degree of idealism to their work, and many leave the field due to insurmountable red tape and spiraling disillusionment. But what about those who stay? And what do their clients think? Negotiating Justice explores how progressive lawyers and their clients negotiate the dissonance between personal idealism and the realities of a system that doesn’t often champion the rights of the poor.

Corey S. Shdaimah draws on over fifty interviews with urban legal service lawyers and their clients to provide readers with a compelling behind-the-scenes look at how different notions of practice can present significant barriers for both clients and lawyers working with limited resources, often within a legal system that many view as fundamentally unequal or hostile. Through consideration of the central themes of progressive lawyering—autonomy, collaboration, transformation, and social change—Shdaimah presents a subtle and complex tableau of the concessions both lawyers and clients often have to make as they navigate the murky and resistant terrains of the legal system and their wider pursuits of justice and power.

Corey S. Shdaimah is Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore School of Social Work.

"Negotiating Justice is one of those exceedingly rare books that examine how lawyers and clients collaborate to produce legality. These stories will be an inspiration to law students aspiring to work in the public interest and an affirmation for the thousands of lawyers who do so daily."

“The book, as a whole, will be a terrific resource for students who would like to leaven their academic scholarship with insights gained from observations, surveys and interviews at a real legal clinic.”

“Negotiating Justice is the kind of book that a mentor might loan to his or her mentee. Shdaimah’s work will be perfect to begin the discussion with the summer intern who asks, ‘What’s it really like to be a Legal Services attorney?’ Finally, someone took the time to record the answer.”