Publication Date
3-14-2022
Abstract
In 2020, Senator Elizabeth Warren launched her presidential campaign in Lawrence, Massachusetts—an economically struggling former mill city. F&M Multiservices was across the street from her press conference. Multiservice businesses pervade urban communities with large immigrant populations, providing a mix of multilingual services like tax preparation, travel, and translation. Multiservice businesses have long been viewed skeptically in legal literature as they are typically analyzed through the lens of immigration law and scrutinized due to legitimate concerns about fraud. This Article analyzes the value of multiservice businesses from the perspective of urban law and poverty law and argues that multiservice businesses like F&M Multiservices are an untapped resource that could do more to support urban communities and advance social mobility with an improved regulatory framework. This Article uses multiservice business as an example of how law reform can contribute to place-based approaches to development and the advancement of social mobility by amplifying community-devised solutions. I argue that multiservice businesses have the potential to increase access to justice, both in the sense of access to legal counsel and justice in a broader sense, and community economic development (CED) for both the multiservice business entrepreneur and the community in which the multiservice business operates. As the access to justice movement considers broadening its scope and involving more nonlawyers and as the CED movement looks for strategies that will create economic opportunities and build community power, I argue that multiservice businesses, when properly regulated, can help close access to justice gaps and be a productive source of community power. I submit a prescription for the regulation of multiservice businesses as an example of how law reform can ease the path of those striving for upward mobility by supporting strategies devised in the community.
First Page
87
Recommended Citation
Jared C. Nicholson, Multiservice Businesses and Social Mobility: Reform to Lift Community Leaders, 99 DENV. L. REV. 87 (2021).