Registration for RebLaw 2012 is now open!

Who: Proud-to-Be-Rebels
What: The Eighteenth Annual Rebellious Lawyering Conference. The RebLaw Conference is an annual, student-run conference that brings together practitioners, law students, and community advocates from around the country to discuss innovative, progressive approaches to law and social change.
Where: Yale Law School, New Haven, CT.
When:  Friday, February 17–Saturday, February 18, 2012
Cost: Standard registration is $30. Registration is free for members of the Yale, UConn, New Haven, and Quinnipiac communities.

Register here.

You must register by February 1 in order to be guaranteed housing.

    *Excited about RebLaw, but feel like something is missing?  Have an     idea about a perfect addition to the schedule?  The COMMUNITY         ROOM is the place for you.

    *Check out our Facebook page for regular updates. And join the conversation     at the Reblawg!

2012 Keynote Speakers

Gerald López

In 1975, after a clerkship with the Honorable Edward J. Schwartz, Gerald P. López joined Tom Adler, Roy Cazares, and Napoleon Jones in founding a San Diego law firm, specializing in criminal defense, civil rights litigation, and community mobilization. In 2003, he founded the Center for Community Problem Solving in New York City, working with low-income, of color, and immigrant communities to address social, economic, and legal problems.

Professor López has served on the NYU, Stanford, and UCLA law faculties. Among the courses he currently teaches are Rebellious Lawyering Workshop, Reentry Clinic, Economic Development Clinic, Problem Solving Workshop, Community Outreach, Education and Organizing Clinic, Economic Development Clinic, Legal Analysis Workshop, and Transforming Legal Education Workshop. 

He has litigated extensively, as lead counsel in a wide variety of criminal and civil matters, before trial courts, appellate courts, and the United States Supreme Court. And he had been a part of a diverse local, national, and international mobilization campaigns. With others, he has championed a rebellious vision of progressive law practice – and of the radically egalitarian and democratic problem solving of which lawyering should be one example.

He has published many acclaimed community-focused books, including Los Angeles Reentry Guide (2011), Reentry Guide to New York City (2005); Streetwise About Money (2006); A Fair and Just Workplace (2006), and many articles on problem solving, race, immigration, health, and legal education. He is the author of Rebellious Lawyering (1992), an influential book about lawyering, progressive law practice, and community problem solving. While the Kenneth & Harle Montgomery of Public Interest Law, he helped found the Lawyering for Social Change Program at Stanford Law School, and he is currently a core faculty member of the UCLA’s Critical Race Studies Program.  He has been honored with many community, civil rights, and teaching awards, including Stanford and UCLA’s Teacher of the Year, The Rutter Award for Teaching Excellence, the University Distinguished Teaching Award, and the Eby Award for the Art of Teaching.

Lisa Daugaard 

Lisa Daugaard is Deputy Director and supervises the Racial Disparity Project at the Defender Association in Seattle.

The Racial Disparity Project works to reduce racial bias in the criminal justice system.  Since 2001, under Lisa’s leadership, the project has focused on racial disparity in Seattle drug arrests, and since 2005, they have worked to develop a pre-booking, community-based diversion model for low-level drug suspects (including dealers).  The RDP is supported by grants from the Ford Foundation, the Open Society Foundation, the RiverStyx Foundation and the Massena Foundation.

Lisa has been a felony and misdemeanor lawyer at the Defender Association, and supervised its misdemeanor division from 2002-2006. In 1999, as a staff attorney, she led the successful defense of hundreds of activists falsely arrested during the WTO demonstrations.  Prior to becoming a public defender in 1996, she directed the Urban Justice Center Organizing Project and was Legal Director of the Coalition for the Homeless, both in New York City, and was a fellow at the ACLU National Legal Department, where she helped to coordinate the successful campaign and litigation to shut down the internment camp for HIV+ Haitian refugees at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base.

Lisa graduated from the University of Washington in 1983, obtained a M.A. in Government from Cornell University in 1987, and a J.D. from Yale Law School in 1995 (Class of 1992).

Andrew Friedman

Andrew Friedman is a graduate of Columbia College and New York University School of Law. He co-founded Make the Road New York in March 1997, and has been Co-Executive Director ever since, overseeing the organizing, policy, legal services, finance and operations departments. Andrew has worked with the Latino Workers' Center, the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem, the Center for Urban Community Services, the Government Benefits Unit at Brooklyn Legal Services Corporation A, and MFY Legal Services Mental Health Law Project. In addition to being Co-Executive Director of Make the Road New York, Andrew is currently an Adjunct Clinical Teacher at NYU Law School teaching the Law, Organizing and Social Change Clinic. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Brooklyn Cooperative Credit Union, the Make the Road Action Fund, and the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development.

In April of 2012, Andrew will be leaving Make the Road NY to found the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD), a high-impact national organization that will promote equity, opportunity and a dynamic democracy by partnering with base-building organization nationwide to generate organizing power and transform the state and local policy landscape. Through strategic partnerships, the CPD will take the innovative and successful organizing model of MRNY to a national scale and will develop, win and replicate important city and state policy victories for immigrants, communities of color and working families.

Most importantly, Andrew is the thrilled and overwhelmed parent of three spectacular boys -- Guillermo, Matis and Maximo Friedman-Villegas.

Andrea Ritchie

Andrea Ritchie coordinates Streetwise & Safe (SAS), a leadership development initiative aimed at sharing "know your rights" information, strategies for safety and visions for change among LGBT youth of color who experience gender, race, sexuality and poverty-based policing and criminalization in the context of "quality of life" initiatives and the policing of sex work and trafficking.

Ritchie's original piece, Law Enforcement Violence Against Women of Color appeared in The Color of Violence: The INCITE! anthology (2006, South End Press).  She was a primary authors of In the Shadows of the War on Terror: Persistent Police Brutality and Abuse in the United States, a “shadow report” submitted on behalf of over 100 national and local organizations and individuals to the United Nations Committee Against Torture, the United Nations Human Rights Committee, and the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. She was also a consultant and co-author for Caught in the Net, a report on women and the “war on drugs” published by the ACLU, the Brennan Center for Justice, and Break the Chains, and Education Not Deportation: Impacts of New York City School Safety Policies on Immigrant Youth, published by Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM).

 

Ritchie is co-author of Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States (Beacon Press 2011), www.queerinjustice.com. Her book, Violence Every Day: Racial Profiling and Police Brutality Against Women, Girls and Transgender People of Color, is forthcoming from South End Press.