RebLaw Conference Scheduled for February 19-20th
The 22nd annual Rebellious Lawyering Conference (RebLaw) will be held from Friday, February 19th to Saturday, February 20th, 2016, at Yale Law School.
RebLaw is the nation’s largest student-run public interest conference. Every year, the conference brings together hundreds of people from around the country to discuss innovative, progressive approaches to the law and social change. The RebLaw conference, grounded in the spirit of Gerald Lopez’s Rebellious Lawyering, seeks to build a community of law students, practitioners, and activists seeking to work in the service of social change movements and to challenge hierarchies of race, wealth, gender, and expertise within legal practice and education.
This year’s conference features 26 panel sessions addressing a wide range of topics, including Gun Violence Prevention: Mounting a Challenge to the NRA; Climate Change, Migration, and Human Rights; Movement Lawyering with Law for Black Lives; Opening the Black Box: Big Data, Disparate Impact, and Algorithmic (In)Justice; Abolish Cash Bail: Stop Jailing People for Being Poor; Rebellious Careers in Food and Agriculture Law; Organizing for a Better Education; The “Civil Gideon” Movement; Children in the Justice System: Ending Transfers to Adult Courts and Prisons; and many more. A complete list of panels can be found here.
The conference will also welcome two keynote speakers, both of whom are uniquely qualified to speak about social justice lawyering. Kent Wong, Director of the UCLA Labor Center, will deliver the opening keynote address. A former staff attorney for the Service Employees International Union, Wong’s dedication to advancing progressive social change in labor and immigration law is unparalleled. He was the founding president of both the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance and the United Association for Labor Education and is currently the vice president of the California Federation of Teachers. He also teaches courses in labor studies and Asian American studies at UCLA.
Jaribu Hill, Executive Director of the Mississippi Worker’s Center for Human Rights and civil rights veteran, will deliver the closing keynote. Hill is an expert in using a human rights framework to situate the struggles of low-wage workers in the South with international struggles for human rights. As a student at CUNY Law, Hill and a group of fellow students traveled to the Mississippi delta to speak with local civil rights and voting rights activists. Upon graduating, she founded the Mississippi Worker’s Center for Human Rights, which sends students to work with nonprofit legal services and civil rights organizations in Mississippi and Louisiana during their winter breaks. She also co-founded the Southern Human Rights Organizers Conference (later the Southern Human Rights Organizers Network).
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 the University of Connecticut, University of New Haven, Quinnipiac University, and the surrounding New Haven community. 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.
