Doug Smith

Background

About Doug Smith

doug5mith.wordpress.com/ Hi there. I'm Doug (he/him)- a community lawyer, advocate, urban planner, and educator living and working in Los Angeles. I'm the Vice President of Policy and Legal Strategy at Inclusive Action for the City, where I help guide a coordinated strategy to transform unjust economic systems and build durable community power. Before joining Inclusive Action, I was a Senior Attorney and the Director of Policy and Coalition Building at Public Counsel, where I led a team of movement lawyers supporting grassroots campaigns for housing and economic justice. In these roles, I have worked with coalitions to craft legal and policy strategies to legalize street vending across California, expand rent control and tenant protections, promote equitable land use planning, and create thousands of new affordable homes. I am also an adjunct professor - I currently teach courses on community lawyering at Occidental College, and previously co-taught the Community Economic Development Clinic at UCLA School of Law. My teaching explores the role of the law and of lawyers in social justice movements. I work with students to investigate how legal systems and legal strategies, in isolation, can disempower client groups and impede structural transformation, and to explore an evolving movement lawyering model that promotes greater lawyer accountability to community-led movement organizations and looks to movement activism as the basis for legal and political transformation. My writing promotes community-led advocacy and explores themes of community-centered policy design and systems change strategies. My work has appeared in journals such as the Fordham Law Review, UCLA Law Review Discourse, and the Journal of Affordable Housing and Community Development Law, as well as the opinion section of the L.A. Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. I also serve on the California Department of Insurance Curriculum Board, and from 2015 to 2020, I served on the Los Angeles County Regional Planning Commission. I hold an M.A. in Urban and Regional Planning from UCLA School of Public Affairs and a J.D. from UCLA School of Law.