Economic Empowerment in the Alabama Black Belt: A Transactional Law Clinic Theory and Model

This essay argues that transactional legal clinics that serve university, urban, and rural communities with cultures and ecosystems shaped by the long-term impacts of racial segregation, Civil Rights, and socioeconomic disenfranchisement can play both a powerful symbolic role and a practical material role in regional economic development by providing direct client representation to historically and economically significant organizations and by training lawyers in transactional methods to use the law to impact the industrial identity and economic vitality of their communities. This essay concludes with a design for a transactional law clinic model.