A Successful First Cohort of the Summer Legal Academy

In August, The Action Lab, the Law and Political Economy Project at Yale, and the Initiative for Community Power at NYU hosted students from a variety of law schools across NYC at our inaugural Summer Academy on Law Organizing, and Power Building, which focused on law and political economy and organizing frameworks in the areas of housing justice and decarceration/abolition.

We believe that amid the escalating and interlocking crises that define our current moment, the work of social justice lawyers must be imaginative, far-reaching, and grounded in a critique of the political, economic, and legal structures that undergird and reproduce neoliberal capitalism.  Lawyers and organizers, working collaboratively, must move beyond a focus on short-term gains and defensive struggles to an engagement with transformative politics. It was in this spirit that the Summer Academy was organized.

We thank our amazing instructors Marika Dias from the Safety Net Project, Marbre Stahly-Butts from Law for Black Lives, Amy Kapczynski from Yale Law School, Jawanza James Williams from VOCAL-NY, Jennifer Hernandez from Make the Road New York, TAL Senior Strategy Director Andrew Friedman (also the Director of the Initiative for Community Power at NYU School of Law) and TAL Board member John Whitlow, Associate Professor at the CUNY School of Law.