Derrick Bell's primary concern in his work, "Serving Two Masters: Integration Ideals and Client Interests in School Desegregation Litigation,” is to reexamine school desegregation not as a linear step towards widespread integration, but how racial justice advocacy groups can be ineffective in serving the two masters of their agenda and their clients. Secondly, it is precisely due to how civil rights lawyers prioritize their agenda over their clients that leads to the latter allowing the former to dictate their legal strategy rather than letting the clients and their community have a say. Consequently, the just cause for school desegregation is undermined just as much as furthered by litigation; necessitating an enforcement mechanism to ensure…show more content… Moreover, the issue in these relations has already left damage due to how prior cases saw respective lawyers pay little mind to even not meeting the clients prior- such as the case within NAACP v. Button wherein Justice Harlan observed several named plaintiffs who were not aware of their respective lawyers handling the cases (Bell Jr., p. 13). This fact, as well other breaches of ethical conduct in the support of an integrationist agenda, was why NAACP v. Button declared the organization liable for systematically advising Black parents to collect signatures to join proposed suits (Bell Jr., p. 14). Nevertheless, this key finding of lawyer-client relations negated much of the reasons as to why these suits were brought forth in the first place- to a point where Bell calls upon lawyers to commit to their craft rather than use it to make policy, even if what they have done comes from moral…show more content… In reviewing the work now with knowledge of Brown and the latter school desegregation cases up to the 1980’s, I now feel that in only focusing on the cases themselves, I forgot that lawyers could be just as political-powerful figures if left to their own devices. More blatantly, in attempting to serve justice for the class, these lawyers failed to serve justice to their client- and is that not a failure to serve one’s role, if not more so because those interests may not always align? As I write this as an aspiring lawyer, this work paints the importance of lawyers to be lessened and humbled- not as aspiring policy makers who single handedly pull a Thurgood Marshall through reaffirming the same argument, but who act in concert with the litigants and their communities to bring forth the remedy necessitated by those involved. After all, that is what Thurgood Marshall did in the five Brown cases through actively collaborating with his litigants- so why have no other lawyers of the era followed
