Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2024
ISSN
0006-8047
Publisher
Boston University School of Law
Language
en-US
Abstract
Critical scholars and public defenders alike have grappled with the contradictions at the heart of counseling clients in a carceral system. Systems of oppression operate within the public defender - client relationship because the defender’s role in translating the law also enforces its inequities. Counseling can obscure the workings of the system, providing an illusion of choice despite privileging certain forms of knowledge and tactics.
But the counseling site is also where defenders become exposed to client’s lived experiences, encounter collectivist tactics, and critically examine the tension of their role in the system. Likewise, through counseling defenders can pull back the veil of the legal system and demystify it to allow clients and movements to address the system’s inner workings.
This paper focuses on how counseling reinforces oppression, but also on what can happen when defenders and clients hold out this tension, examine it, and bring it into the counseling relationship. This more robust counseling already naturally occurs, and should be expanded in a principled and intentional manner. When defenders and clients embrace the contradictions at the heart of counsel and lay it bare, they can help transform the counseling site into a location where epistemes interact. Defenders and clients can collaborate, pool their knowledge, and trace back their constraints to the mechanisms that replicate systems of oppression. They can then go forth from the counseling site together, or separately, or with other partners entirely to forums where varied tactics can disrupt those underlying mechanisms.
Recommended Citation
Angelo Petrigh,
Counseling Oppression
,
in
104
Boston University Law Review
(2024).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/faculty_scholarship/3744
Included in
Criminal Law Commons, Law and Society Commons, Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility Commons
Comments
forthcoming BULR 2024