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Counseling Community Groups, Paul R. Tremblay

Paul R. Tremblay

The training of lawyers for years has established ethical and practice protocols based upon an individual representation model, or, if the protocols contemplated a form of collective representation, they have envisioned formal, structured entities with powerful constituents. The good lawyers who represent the dispossessed, the exploited, and the powerless need to craft different protocols, ones which accept messier, less organized, and often contentious group representation. Writing about the ethical and political mission of “community lawyers” has flourished, but that scholarship has tended to elide some knotty practical questions about the lawyers’ professional responsibilities in their work with such groups. This …