The People’s Parity Project is a group of young lawyers and law students who aim to use their power to demystify the law for the public.
The group was founded by Emma Janger, Sejal Singh, Vail Kohnert-Yount and Molly Coleman in 2018.
“Our work has grown a lot since then,” said Kohnert-Yount.
Today, the group boasts chapters in law schools around the country, a left-wing counter to a long-running effort from right-wing groups like the Federalist Society to bring law students into the ideological fold. People’s Parity Project is filling a gap where few like-minded groups have succeeded.
Unrigging the legal system
The group wants to unrig the legal system, primarily by fighting against forced arbitration, a legal mechanism of resolving conflicts without courts. The practice is used to bring quick resolutions to disputes but is frequently abused by corporations with high-powered attorneys who intimidate employees out of pushing for their rights.
“The vast majority of American consumers and non-union workers are subject to forced arbitration agreements and class-action waivers that block them from going to court when their rights are violated,” the group says on its website.
Coleman told Blue Tent that part of the impulse behind the organization’s development came from thinking about how the legal profession could make an outsized impact on the larger community. Pivoting to a framing focused on those impacts was key in the group’s evolution into a nationwide cause.
“We’re talking about unrigging the law,” she said. “Creating a legal system where people can get a fair shot.”
Kohnert-Yount, who went to school to represent indigent clients, said that seeing all the money flowing into universities from law firms made her skeptical their hearts were in the right place. Fast-forward to today, and the group has grown from a few students selling buttons to a nonprofit with chapters across the country.
“It’s so urgent,” she said. “These problems have been long in the making.”
Targeting law schools
The value of organizing in law schools is that students are often taught a limited set of tools, said Coleman, litigating and writing contracts and the like. That’s not going to change the world without organizing to develop and refine a robust set of tools that can address inequities in the legal system.
“A huge part of our strategy is working with law students and lawyers on behalf of people in court,” said Coleman.
People’s Parity Project asks law students and legal professionals to rethink the levers they have available to effect change. The group connects to communities in law schools and then provides support, allowing individual chapters to launch with full funding already in place. This has practical effects, Coleman said, because student groups are not beholden to schools or local firms—allowing them to take actions like walkouts without fearing that funding would be imperiled.
“We see directly how law firms fund popular student groups,” said Kohnert-Yount.
The group instead derives the majority of its funding from partner organizations—large progressive groups like Demand Justice, the Center for Popular Democracy, and Justice Catalyst—and has received funding from the Harvard Public Service Venture Fund.
“In legal circles, there’s the assumption you should turn to private firms,” said Coleman. “We made the decision to avoid them, so we do not even need to talk to big firms.”
