Katie Eyer

Online
Essay
Textualism and Progressive Social Movements
Katie Eyer
Professor of Law, Rutgers Law School.

Many thanks to Tara Leigh Grove, Eric Fish, and Logan Everett Sawyer for helpful feedback on this project. Maya Lorey, Alexandra Webb, and Erin Yonchak of the University of Chicago Law Review Online provided excellent editorial suggestions and assistance.

Should progressive movement lawyers avoid making textualist arguments? This Essay suggests that the answer is no. While there may be good reasons for movement lawyers to eschew arguments associated with their ideological opponents, none of those reasons apply to the embrace of textualist arguments by progressive movements today. Indeed, the time may be especially ripe for progressive social movements to make increased use of textualist legal arguments.