Five years ago, in the wake of massive mobilizations for racial justice in the U.S. and the early pandemic, we urged fellow law teachers to stand in solidarity with left social movements. “Movement Law,” as we called it, represented an attempt to work within and alongside collective struggles for emancipation. In making the case for this form of intellectual work, we were motivated by the insurgent formations that had arisen over the previous decade to confront civilizational challenges, from climate catastrophe to bloated carceral state power to the staggering concentration of wealth among oligopolies and within finance.
2025 finds us at a different moment, marked by concentrated power and resistance still, and by forms of repression and retrenchment paradigmatic of fascism. State agents are demonizing and disappearing disfavored others in the name of white nationalism. Federal and state governments are hollowing out our democratic institutions as they work with police to repress social rebellion against an unpopular president and bipartisan status quo. And powerful economic behemoths are shaping the very possibilities and limits of our collective future.
In this moment, what can analysis born from struggle tell us about how to move forward?
Incipient Fascism
To begin, we must understand every moment for the continuities and ruptures that it contains. Our current moment is not a clean break in the structure of American democracy. In many ways, it is a continuation of race-gender-and-class domination that critical race theorists, fem-crits, critical legal scholars, and Marxists have analyzed for decades. While incarcerated in the 1970s, Angela Davis wrote of the surveillance, imprisonment, and killing of her comrades by the state as part of the “incipient” stage of fascism. Repression of Black liberation movements was accompanied by the repression of organized labor, the spread of U.S. imperialism, and the expansion of police power against ordinary people. Oppressed people are “the first and most deeply injured victims of fascism,” Davis observed. Those who have experienced fascist repression have analyzed state violence in its myriad forms at different moments in time. By attending to these analyses, we begin to map the terrains and methods of struggle, and work toward a clearer understanding of where and when we are now.
One purpose of movement law scholarship is to document the dialectic between rebellion and repression: the construction of demands, platforms, and manifestos; the growth of bail and bond funds; the rioting and rebelling on the streets; and the repression and cooptation in turn. In 2020, for example, local police and federal agents engaged in violence against protesters in cities and towns alike. Before that, police arrested water protectors in the shadow of bulldozers at Standing Rock. By thinking and organizing in solidarity with people already resisting repression, we learn how power operates and adapts. We see the contradictions between law and democracy; police and freedom; capitalism and indigenous sovereignty.
Social movements have long pursued strategies and tactics to break the stronghold of concentrated state, economic, and private power. Such popular resistance points to the chasm between the state and social need, as well as the tactical weak points of the prevailing regime. To see how this has worked in recent years, consider Stop Cop City, the student encampments in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle, and resistance to ICE: three terrains of struggle in which countless people have mounted sustained and creative resistance over time despite extraordinary odds.
Stop Cop City
The Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta emerged in 2022 in opposition to the construction of a $90 million police training center and the destruction of sacred forest land. Stop Cop City wove together anti-carceral, Indigenous, and environmental and racial justice movements. It mobilized tremendous popular resistance to a land and development deal brokered by the police, their corporate backers, and local city officials. Against waves of state repression, organizers charted the interdependence of military and policing on capital investment, environmental extraction, and mainstream media. Meanwhile, the movement’s range of tactics—including political education, City Council testimony, a popular referendum, occupation, sabotage, and a music festival—widened our imaginations about how to resist carceral power.
Georgia’s use of RICO conspiracy and domestic terrorism charges against Stop Cop City activists have demonstrated the lengths that the state will go to criminalize groups organizing for emancipatory forms of care and safety. The collective defense and movement lawyering efforts against these political prosecutions demonstrate the power of solidarity. After an arduous fight, the RICO charges will likely be dismissed. But those experiencing the brunt of this state violence are calling out prosecutions as an expansive if familiar strategy to defend the status quo of inequality and carceral growth. The Stop Cop City movement did not prevent the razing of forest land nor the building of a gargantuan police training center (both happened in 2025), and yet the movement’s repertoire of action and ideation has inspired similar pushes across the nation and the world.
Student Encampments
The Palestine solidarity encampments electrified student and faculty struggles across campuses last year. Students at Columbia University built the first encampment to advance a student demand that the university divest from Israel. They drew an explicit connection to earlier chapters of internationalist struggle by students against university complicity, from the 1968 student protest against the US war in Vietnam to student protests in the 1990s demanding divestment from apartheid South Africa. As the university unleashed the NYPD on the students for refusing to move, students across the country built their own encampments with parallel demands for financial transparency and divestment. Over 100 student encampments went up that spring.
The analyses emerging from these spring encampments built on a decade of movement critiques of capitalism, colonialism, and the carceral state. Participants expanded these critiques to call out the role of the United States around the world and to connect imperialism abroad to repression at home. The images of Israeli soldiers terrorizing Palestinians echoed police brutalizing protestors, the poor, and Black and brown people as well as the structure of settler colonialism within the United States.
As with prior episodes of viral popular disobedience—like Occupy or the George Floyd rebellion—the students were met with incredible repression from police, as well as administrators and even Congress. That academic year forced us to confront the extent of the donor class’s power over higher education, and the hollowed-out condition of democratic governance within our workplaces. What became quickly undeniable was that the academy is a core site of conflict: not separate and apart from broader society but embedded within it.
Resisting Immigration Enforcement
The repression of Palestinian solidarity on university campuses carried over into the second Trump administration, where students like Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk were the initial target of masked immigration enforcement agents. Since 9/11, immigration enforcement has served as a testing laboratory for the carceral state and its corporate backbone—including CoreCivic, GEO, and Palantir—largely unconstrained by democratic control. As in any campaign of state terror, the targets of immigration enforcement shift over time, depending on the needs of the governing regime.
Organizers and activists have fought local cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. Some have challenged the expansive footprint of immigration detention and continue to contest the opening of new facilities, such as the makeshift ICE facility built on sacred swampland in Florida known as “Alligator Alcatraz.” Elsewhere, residents—often building on rapid response networks formed in the last decade and a half—have used direct action and mutual aid to defend against masked bands of militarized federal agents. Those resisting efforts to cleave apart families and communities are building solidarities across race, ethnicity, national origin, status, and class, while a new generation of movement lawyers fights racist arrests in the courts.
The Trump administration has responded to resistance with a strategic retreat toward targeted enforcement and by pushing for military deployments in cities. The crisis has created fissures within the state and opportunities for politicians willing to confront the administration. Even as the Supreme Court provides back door authorization for ICE’s terror campaign, in communities and district courts organizers and movement lawyers are resisting and documenting the violence unleashed by the state.
Kimberly Crenshaw argued in 1988 that collective contestation inside and outside of courts can challenge dominant ideologies of subordination, even as laws and legal tools solidify retrenchment. Though it remains to be seen where today’s resistance will lead, sanctuary advocates, detention abolitionists, raid resistors, and movement lawyers are challenging incipient fascism in important ways. Each of these efforts represent creative modes of resistance and analysis on which we might build.
Terrains of Struggle
Amid this resistance and repression, reading Angela Davis on incipient fascism hits us differently. As she said then from Marin County Jail, “No potential victim of the fascist terror should be without the knowledge that the greatest menace to racism and fascism is unity!” As Trump and his allies continue to expand their attacks, few of us can still claim that we are not fascism’s potential victims. Unity and resistance are more essential than ever. We argued in Movement Law for legal scholars to write in solidarity with social movements. The call now is to look to those vulnerable to state repression and those organizing against it, and to support them with our relative social power and institutional resources—through our writing, speaking, teaching, organizing, and lawyering.
Campuses are demarcated battlegrounds in the struggle for democracy and against fascism. Every day we choose how to show up. Colleagues have joined AAUP chapters and supported campus labor struggles; challenged politically-motivated deportations of students; and opposed federal cuts to science grants, DEI initiatives, and university employment. They are joining litigation efforts beyond campus to defend people from criminalization, deportation, and other forms of legal repression. In all of this, it is essential that we build solidarity with people engaged in direct confrontations with state carceral and economic power. To take creative collective action. From this place of solidarity, writing and scholarship may emerge that expands our capacity to understand, confront, and overcome fascism.
Resistance formations generate strategies, confront entrenched status quo ideologies, and expand the geographic, tactical, and ideational terrains of struggle. As legal scholars, we should be a part of collective action and thinking that engages the law while recognizing its limits, that infuses collective knowledge into our understanding of law’s operation. Many have characterized this moment as a rule of law or constitutional crisis. But people at the bottom and on the periphery have experienced such contradictions between promise and reality for generations. Every moment is different and there is no going back. For the best hope of emancipatory futures, legal analysis and education must be grounded in these struggles past and present, unafraid of meeting the contradictions head on.
