Boston University School of Law

Discovering the Fells Reservation has been a quality of life boon to my family and I look forward to long walks there with my dog—when I get a dog, when I graduate, unless we get the bison that my son told his BU Children’s Center teachers that he wants. The Fells is only a 14-minute drive from BU Bridge according to Google Maps, which I trust since my friend designed that little yellow guy that you drag onto the map for Street View.

You don’t need a car to get there either: “To the West Side of the Middlesex Fells: Orange Line to Wellington Station, MBTA bus #100 to Roosevelt Circle Rotary. Walk south to the rotary, turn right on South Border Road, Bellevue Pond entrance to the Reservation is 0.2 mile up South Border Road on the right.” Having ready access to natural areas, especially in the city, reminds me of how much I appreciate certain things held in common. I will probably never have my own personal backyard woods of 2000 acres, but I don’t lack what we all share. I’m not going to have my own farm anytime soon, either, but our Red Fire Farm CSA share delivers MA-grown produce through MetroPed each Thursday. I dig Whole Foods, and you’ll definitely find my family there now and again… but we can actually afford a CSA share on the regular.

Increasing access to fresh food, natural areas and whatever else through common ownership is a good thing in my book, supplementing efforts to increase access by everyone making more money. (I know you’re not thinking about law school in terms of the money you’ll make, because your heart’s in it. I’m talking about everyone else.) It might be lop-sided for the second of these complimentary approaches to get more institutional attention, as it generally does.

Inclusion as gaining access

The UN-sponsored Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor released a 2008 report entitled Making the Law Work for Everyone, and you know I have to ask: what has law been doing all these hundreds of years that in 2008 it has to be made to work for everyone? Former UK Prime Minister and Commission member Gordon Brown explained in the introduction that “the sources of legal exclusion are numerous” though four pillars of reform stand out, including poor people’s “property rights [to tap] the intrinsic economic power of their property” and legal recognition of informal businesses to enable “access [to] credit, investment… [and] global and local markets.” My takeaway: poor people need equity and seed money to make money, then presumably the money made does the antipoverty work itself.

Inclusion as changing the terms

I realize that exiting poverty means becoming unpoor, but there are at least two directions to go from there according to the dictionary function on my MacBook. A vow of poverty would be “the renunciation of the right to individual ownership of property,” and for those who live as though under that vow, without having taken that vow, widening access to individual wealth building is an important goal. Yet poverty is equally “the state of being inferior in quality,” which socially speaking, is socially constructed. For an example of addressing that sense of poverty, I’m inspired to use law like Enrique Peñalosa did as former mayor of Bogotá, Colombia:

If we in the Third World measure our success or failure as a society in terms of income, we would have to classify ourselves as losers until the end of time… So with our limited resources, we have to invent other ways to measure success. This might mean that all kids have access to sports facilities, libraries, parks, schools, nurseries.

Check out this tour of today’s Bogotá with Enrique’s brother Gil:

I see this antipoverty approach as community enrichment, a bit different than the Commission’s mostly-individual enrichment. The Bogotá approach is sooo inclusion level two, changing the terms. Wealth is redefined with community-based values instead of just funneling a few people into individual wealth with everyone else waiting their turn for that “equal opportunity,” and developmental focus is shifted to shared-resource management.

The commons, it seems to me, is a quintessential poor people’s idea, not as an experiment or aspiration, but as a commonsense choice of solidarity over getting picked off by the hardness of life. Hopefully the stigma of “inferior in quality” as per the second sense of poverty won’t rob the law of some good ideas—good for making the law work for everyone. One test of my commitment to solidarity through the commons, I suppose, will be whether I ditch CSAs when I’m off student loans. I hope not.

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