When Nikolas Bowie, Yochai Benkler and Samantha Power hit roadblocks to their beliefs, they pivoted to fresh approaches
In college, Harvard Law School Professor Nikolas Bowie ’14 spent a summer as a hotel union organizer and saw firsthand the differences for people who worked in unionized hotels in Washington, D.C., and those who worked in hotels in Virginia, a “right-to-work” state that prohibits requiring employees to belong to a union or to pay dues.
Bowie went to law school hoping to repeal such laws through the courts.
There was just one problem. An increasingly conservative judiciary wasn’t open to that argument. The realization forced Bowie to reevaluate his approach to advocacy.
“I don’t want to spend my career banging my head against a wall, writing for dissenting justices,” the Louis D. Brandeis Professor of Law recalled thinking. Ultimately, he began to embrace a theory of institutional change that is not “just tied to litigation but is instead tied to more democratic participation.”
In other words, Bowie changed his mind, as he described in the fifth annual panel discussion that asks Harvard Law faculty to reflect on circumstances in which they did just that.
More at
https://hls.harvard.edu/today/why-three-professors-changed-their-minds/
