Clinic Community Town Hall: Gathering Momentum for Racial Justice

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Session Type: AALS Programs

Session Capacity: N/A

Hotel: N/A

Room: Red Lacquer

Floor: Fourth Floor

Building on past conversations about our vision of social justice in challenging times, we invite you to join us for a discussion about our responsibility as clinicians to develop and implement a racial analysis in our clinical pedagogy and practice. In our current historical moment, we are witnessing the rise of increasingly open reactionary forces in our politics and culture that target African-American and Latinx populations as subjects of racialized violence. In this moment of confronting the depth and complexity of racial injustice and the limits of past lawyering practices in addressing systemic issues, the goal of this Town Hall is to allow us to reflect on our commitment to justice and equity for marginalized communities. The conversation will challenge us to consider how to best implement that commitment in our clinics. We hope to engage clinicians from a wide variety of practice areas as we discuss how we can meaningfully leverage our clinical resources to support, empower and advocate with African-American and Latinx communities in our geographic areas.

The Town Hall will begin with a guided discussion with Erica Perry and Marbre Stahly-Butts from Law for Black Lives and Leticia Saucedo and Luz Herrera from the Network for Justice on their unique and transformative models for engaging clinics in racial justice advocacy. Our speakers will offer practical proposals for approaches and issues that can be integrated into clinical teaching and case selection. We will then break into smaller discussion groups to share our current productive practices focused on these issues and surface our concerns for the challenges that might arise in operationalizing our racial justice analysis more deeply in our clinic work. Finally, we will return to the larger conversation and collectively brainstorm solutions to these challenges and new visions for the future of racial justice in the clinical context.