Law and Organizing Academy
Tuesday, May 23 to Friday, May 26, 2023
Borden Estate | Hudson Valley, NY
Hosted by:
Today’s sessions are designed to provide an overview of the role of law in constituting the political economy of neoliberalism and a critical analysis of the state of grassroots organizing.
Today’s sessions will cover gentrification, displacement, and law and policy efforts to support tenant organizing and to decommodify urban property.
Today will start with a video on the criminal legal system’s development since the neoliberal turn, followed by a discussion of organizing and mass mobilization against state repression and carcerality. The day will continue with sessions on mass incarceration, racialized police violence, abolition, decarceration, and law and policy efforts to transform the criminal legal system.
This session will begin with a discussion of the recent upsurge in labor organizing, and how we might reconcile it with previous declines in labor law and traditional unionism. We will ask: what is the role of lawyers in the evolving labor movement? Organizers will then share their perspectives on building worker power in the 21st century.
Our summer academy concludes with critical reflections on the past three days and dreaming big together about how we can use the law to build people power and create a better social order.
Ana María Archila emigrated from Colombia at the age of 17 and is a leading voice for racial justice, economic justice and immigrant rights in New York and nationally. As co-Executive Director of Make the Road New York (MRNY) she helped build a powerful force for change in New York and nationally. MRNY members, mostly working class Latino immigrants, have led transformative victories for low-income New Yorkers, including increases to the minimum wage, paid sick days, and strong protections from wage-theft, while helping make NYC a leading Sanctuary City. As co-Executive Director of the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD), Ana María has helped build its community organizing network to include 45 affiliate organizations in 32 states working to advance an agenda of racial and economic justice and a vibrant democracy.
Corinne Blalock is the Executive Director of the Law and Political Economy Project and an Associate Research Scholar at Yale Law School. Her research draws on her education in both law and critical theory. Prior to joining the LPE Project, Corinne was a fellow at the Center for Race, Law, and Politics at Duke Law School while completing her JD/PhD. Her dissertation, The Privatization of Protection: The Neoliberal Fourteenth Amendment, traces how the liberal ideals of equal protection and due process have been redefined according to the needs, logics, and limits of the market with material consequences disproportionately borne by the poor and working class. She recently edited a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly on “Law and the Critique of Capitalism.”
Marika Dias is the Managing Director of the Urban Justice Center’s Safety Net Project (SNP), which provides tenant legal services, public benefits and homeless advocacy, and also organizes with homeless New Yorkers. Marika is a public interest attorney who has worked in civil legal services since 2001 with a focus on providing legal services that support community organizing efforts and grassroots organizing groups. Prior to her role at SNP, Marika was the Director of the Tenant Rights Coalition at Legal Services NYC and before that, she was the Managing Attorney at Make the Road New York. Marika is a member of the Steering Committee of the Right to Counsel NYC Coalition, works on the Right To The City Alliance’s national legal committee, and is a movement lawyering trainer. Marika is also an active board member of the Queer Detainee Empowerment Project, which provides services for incarcerated LGBTQ+ migrants and organizes around prison abolition.
Professor Veena Dubal’s research focuses on the intersection of law, technology, and precarious work. Within this broad frame, she uses empirical methodologies and critical theory to understand (1) the impact of digital technologies and emerging legal frameworks on the lives of workers, (2) the co-constitutive influences of law and work on identity, and (3) the role of law and lawyers in solidarity movements. Professor Dubal has been cited by the California Supreme Court, and her scholarship has been published in top-tier law review and peer-reviewed journals, including the California Law Review, Wisconsin Law Review, Berkeley Journal of Empirical and Labor Law, and Perspectives on Politics. Professor Dubal joined the Hastings Faculty in 2015, after a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University (also her undergraduate alma mater). Prior to that, Professor Dubal received her J.D. and Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, where she conducted an ethnography of the San Francisco taxi industry. The subject of her doctoral research arose from her work as a public interest attorney and Berkeley Law Foundation fellow at the Asian Law Caucus where she founded a taxi worker project and represented Muslim Americans in civil rights cases.
Andrew Friedman is Senior Director of Strategy and co-founder of The Action Lab. He is also the Director of the Initiative for Community Power at NYU School of Law. He founded the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD), the largest federated network of community organizing groups in the United States, in 2012 and co-lead the organization for 10 years. Andrew previously co-founded and spent 15 years building Make the Road New York into the leading democratically run, immigrant-led community organization in New York State. Andrew helped found Local Progress, a national network of progressive municipal elected officials. Andrew has taught at the NYU School of Law, Cardozo School of Law, the New School for Social Research and Columbia Law School. He is on the Board of Directors of Make the Road Action, Hester Street, the Action Lab and Local Progress, as well as the Editorial Advisory Board of The Forge. Andrew is a magna cum laude graduate of Columbia College and a cum laude graduate of the New York University School of Law. Most importantly, Andrew is the overjoyed and proud father of three beautiful boys.
Jennifer Hernandez is a Lead Organizer at Make the Road New York with several years of experience organizing in immigrant and faith communities. Jennifer leads the organization's Housing campaigns, organizing tenants across New York City and the Westchester county area. Before joining Make the Road, she was an organizer at Centro Presente, an immigrant rights group in Boston, where she led successful campaigns to protect immigrants. She is an expert at developing leadership of grassroots community members and mobilizing faith communities. Jennifer has a Masters of Divinity in Liberation Theology from Harvard University. Her organizing work is informed by her experience as a daughter of undocumented parents growing up in the vibrant immigrant community of Washington Heights.
Amy Kapczynski is a Professor of Law at Yale Law School, Faculty Co-Director of the Law and Political Economy Project, cofounder of the Law and Political Economy blog, and Faculty Co-Director of the Global Health Justice Partnership. Her research focuses on law and political economy, and theorizes the failures of legal logic and structure that condition contemporary inequality, precarity, and hollowed out democracy. Her primary areas of focus include health justice and the political economy of technology. She has worked closely with social movements involved in campaigns for access to medicines in the U.S. as well as transnationally, and more recently as part of a coalition calling for a Community Health Corps to combat COVID-19.
Biju Mathew is co-founder and secretary of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, founding secretary of the National Taxi Workers Alliance, and president of the International Alliance of App-Based Transport Workers. He is also an Associate Professor of Management at Rider University, where his work focuses on information systems. Professor Mathew received his PhD in Information Systems & Organizational Change from the University of Pittsburgh in 1994. His 2005 book, "Taxi! Cabs and Capitalism in New York City” provides critical commentary on globalization, urban renewal, migration, and multiculturalism. Biju also co-founded the Forum of Indian Leftists (FOIL) in 1995.
Chris Nielsen is the Assistant Director of Education at National Nurses United, the largest and fastest-growing union of registered nurses in the US. Over the last decade, he has helped develop innovative member education programs to support union nurses’ efforts to build power and advance their fight for workplace democracy, universal health care, and social justice. He also helps coordinate NNU’s response to gig work and other tech-related threats to nurses, patients, and their communities.
Kumar Rao has previously served as Director of Justice Transformation at the Center for Popular democracy, supporting partner organizations and elected officials in the fight for racial equity and criminal legal system transformation at the local, state, and federal levels. A former litigator and public defender, he has represented thousands of clients in state and federal court. Kumar holds a J.D. cum laude from New York University School of Law and a B.B.A with honors from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Jonathan Simon joined the Berkeley Law faculty in 2003 as part of the J.D., JSP, and Legal Studies programs. He teaches in the areas of criminal law, criminal procedure, criminology, legal studies and the sociology of law.
Simon’s scholarship concerns the role of crime and criminal justice in governing contemporary societies, risk and the law, and the history of the interdisciplinary study of law. His published works include over seventy articles and book chapters, and three single authored monographs, including: Poor Discipline: Parole and the Social Control of the Underclass (University of Chicago 1993, winner of the American Sociological Association’s sociology of law book prize, 1994), Governing through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear (Oxford University Press 2007, winner of the American Society of Criminology, Hindelang Award 2010) and Mass Incarceration on Trial: A Remarkable Court Decision and the Future of Prisons in America (New Press 2014). Simon has served as the co-editor-in-chief of the journal, Punishment and Society, and the co-editor of the Sage Handbook of Punishment & Society (along with Richard Sparks). He is a member of the Law & Society Association and the American Society of Criminology. Simon’s scholarship has been recognized internationally with appointment as a Leverhulme Visiting Professorship at the University of Edinburgh (2010-11), a Fellow of the Israeli Institute for Advanced Studies (2016), and a Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (2018). In 2016 Simon was recognized for his scholarship on the human rights of prisoners with the Docteur honoris causa de la Faculté et de l’Institut, Faculté de Droit et Criminologie, Université Catholique de Louvain.
Marbre Stahly-Butts is Executive Director of Law for Black Lives, where she works closely with organizers and communities across the country to advance and actualize radical policy. She currently serves on the Leadership Team of the Movement For Black Lives Policy Table and helped develop the Vision for Black Lives Policy Platform. Since graduating from Yale Law School, Marbre has supported local and national organizations from across the country in their policy development and advocacy. She joined the Center for Popular Democracy as a Soros Justice Fellow in Fall 2013. Her Soros Justice work focused on organizing and working with families affected by aggressive policing and criminal justice policies in New York City in order to develop meaningful bottom up policy reforms. While in law school, Marbre focused on the intersection of criminal justice and civil rights and gained legal experience with the Bronx Defenders, the Equal Justice Initiative and the Prison Policy Initiative. Before law school Marbre received her Masters in African Studies from Oxford University and worked in Zimbabwe organizing communities.
John Whitlow is an Associate Professor at the CUNY School of Law, where he co-directs the Community and Economic Development Clinic (CEDC), supervising the CEDC’s Housing Justice and Tenant Power Practice Area. Before entering academia, John was a Supervising Attorney at Make the Road New York, where he oversaw the organization’s housing and public benefits legal services and worked on a range of law and policy reform initiatives, and a Staff Attorney at the Urban Justice Center’s Community Development Project (now TakeRoot Justice), where he represented tenant associations, grassroots non-profits, and worker-owned cooperatives. John’s research interests – racial capitalism, law and political economy, law and organizing, gentrification/displacement, housing justice – have been shaped by his experience as a community lawyer in New York City and Albuquerque, New Mexico, and by his upbringing in Baltimore, Maryland. John’s writing has appeared in popular and academic forums, including The New York Times, the Albuquerque Journal, Counterpunch, the Law and Political Economy Blog, the Fordham Urban Law Journal, the South Atlantic Quarterly, and the Poverty and Race Journal. John is currently a Senior Fellow at NYU Law School’s Initiative for Community Power and he was the Inaugural Visiting Faculty Fellow at Yale Law School’s Law and Political Economy Project. John holds a B.A. and a certificate in comparative international economic development from Johns Hopkins University, an M.A. from the New School for Social Research, and a J.D. from the CUNY School of Law.
Jawanza James Williams is the Organizing Director at VOCAL-NY, a statewide membership organization that builds power among low-income people directly impacted by HIV/AIDS, the drug war, mass incarceration, and homelessness. He is a native of Beaumont, Texas. Jawanza graduated from Schreiner University and is an alum of Public Allies of New York and the Center for Neighborhood Leadership, organizations dedicated to increasing the capacity of grassroots, community based organizing groups. Jawanza is a member of Black Youth Project 100 and Democratic Socialists of America, where he is a founding member of the Afrosocialists and Socialists of Color Caucus. His organizing efforts have been featured in The New York Times, the Nation, and Slate Magazine. Jawanza is a doctoral student in the department of political science at the CUNY Graduate Center.
