Rebellious Lawyering Conference to Be Held February 17–18
The 23nd annual Rebellious Lawyering Conference (RebLaw) will be held from Friday, February 17 to Saturday, February 18, 2017, at Yale Law School.
This year’s conference will feature 30 panel sessions addressing a wide range of topics, including Narrative as a Tool Against Mass Incarceration; Native Peacemaking and Restorative Justice; Building the Solidarity Economy for a Post-Capitalist Future; #HereToStay: Organizing Immigrant Communities; Queer Futures After Obergefell; Beyond Prisons: Building Non-Carceral Responses to Gender-Based Violence; Challenging Concentrated Corporate Power; Disruptive Public Defense; and many more.
The conference will also feature two keynote speakers, both of whom have spent their careers as lawyer-activists fighting on behalf of marginalized communities. Dr. Pam Palmater, a Mi’kmaw citizen and member of the Eel River Bar First Nation in northern New Brunswick, Canada, will deliver the opening keynote address. Dr. Palmater has spent more than 25 years studying, volunteering, and advocating around issues that affect Indigenous communities, like poverty, housing, child and family services, treaty rights, education, and legislation impacting First Nations. Her recent work has focused on police violence and on violence against Indigenous women and girls. She has been named one of Canada’s top five most influential human rights lawyers and is frequently called as an expert before Parliamentary and United Nations committees. She is currently an Associate Professor and the Chair in Indigenous Governance at Ryerson University.
Purvi Shah, a movement lawyer and one of the forces behind Law4BlackLives, will deliver the closing keynote. Shah started her career as a litigator, law professor, and community organizer in Florida. She co-founded the Community Justice Project at Florida Legal Services, where she litigated on behalf of taxi drivers, tenants, public housing residents, and immigrants. She later became the Director of the Bertha Justice Institute at the Center for Constitutional Rights, where she focused on deepening the theory and practice of movement lawyering across the United States and the world. Most recently, Shah was instrumental in founding Law4BlackLives, a national network of lawyers dedicated to supporting the growing Movement For Black Lives.
RebLaw is the largest student-run public-interest conference in the nation. Every year, the conference draws hundreds of people from around the world to discuss progressive approaches to law, movement-building, and social change. Inspired by the radical vision set forth by Gerald Lopez in his 1992 book, Rebellious Lawyering, RebLaw strives to build coalitions of law students, practitioners, and activists working to build social movements and dismantle hierarchies of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and expertise within legal practice and education.
For more details about the conference, as well as online registration, please visit the RebLaw website. Registration is free for members of Yale University as well as for students at universities in Connecticut and residents of New Haven. The registration fee is $35 for all other attendees. Questions and comments may be directed to reblaw@yale.edu. Follow RebLaw on Facebook and Twitter for updates.
