OCTOBER 10, 2025
In Defense of Protest
In this article, I defend fifteen years of racial justice protests against critiques that they were unproductive, unsophisticated, and unpopular—that they failed and even invited backlash. I advance arguments about meaning, success, and failure.

First, cycles of protest point to popular discontent with the status quo institutional arrangements under which we live. It is time to reject the default presumption in so much legal scholarship that protest is meaningless or irrational or counterproductive and instead to read protest as important social phenomenon.

Second, racial justice movements were successful by many metrics. They shifted elite discourse and popular attitudes about race, police, law, and protest. They created a sufficient crisis or threat to the status quo power arrangements to promulgate reforms and policy changes of the reformist and non-reformist or abolitionist variety. They raised consciousness and built capacity and organization for new possibilities.

Third, to the extent movements did fail—and they did—it was a familiar story of any ambitious movements for popular emancipation and enfranchisement. Their failures were less about popularity and more a reflection of the extent of organized wealth and organized money invested in thwarting or channeling any such change. This is retrenchment or revanchism advanced by organized powerful interests – frontlash or top lash rather than backlash.

This a story about democracy in the United States: serving the few while blaming the whole. 

Amna A. Akbar (Minnesota Law) is a scholar of contemporary social movements, policing, race, capitalism, and inequality. With a focus on protest and organizing, she is interested in understanding law as a dynamic terrain of social, economic, and political contestation, and in how institutions and discourses of law define and delimit possibilities of emancipation. She was most recently the Charles W. Ebersold & Florence Whitcomb Ebersold Professor of Law at The Ohio State University, Moritz College of Law. Akbar's research has appeared in prestigious legal and social science journals, including the Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, Harvard Law Review Forum, California Law Review, and NOMOS. She serves on the editorial board of the Law and Political Economy Blog and regularly writes for popular audiences in outlets like The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Dissent, and N+1.  Faculty Profile.