Panels

Abolitionist Organizing

The Abolitionist Organizing Panel will bring together local organizers and legal practitioners working at the intersection of queer liberation and prison abolition to discuss how we can resist the carceral state and its continued displacement of millions from their homes, loved ones, and communities. We will ask how we can balance immediate harm reduction with building a radical, long-lasting alternative to the carceral state, and what actions we can take to strengthen the movement for abolition.

Speakers:

  • D Dangaran (they/them), Director of Gender Justice at Rights Behind Bars and co-chair of the National Trans Bar Association. 
  • Dee Farmer (she/her), Executive Director of the Fight4Justice Project and the first transgender petitioner to have a case accepted by the United States Supreme Court in Farmer v. Brennan, which established that prisoners have a right to be protected from harm and that prisons are responsible for their safety.
  • Ashley Blount (she/her), Executive Director of the Black Infinity Collective. 
  • Moderator: Greta LaFleur (they/them), Associate Professor of American Studies and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies. 

Contemporary Anticolonial Struggles

Wherever empire persists, the people resist. Liberation struggles thus continue to resonate with each other in places across the world – from Turtle Island to Palestine – and the particularity of oppression and struggle encourages global solidarity rather than precludes it. Yet law itself, too, remains an empire, and movements are themselves places of contestation even as they fight displacement and replacement of all forms. The Anticolonial Struggles Panel will accordingly explore the global resonances across particular anti-colonial struggles and will assess the role of law and lawyers in enabling or limiting our possibilities for anticolonial resistance, solidarity, and freedom.

Speakers:

  • Soheir Asaad (she/her), Palestinian human rights lawyer, political and feminist organizer based in Haifa, and member of Rawa Fund’s Advocacy Team.
  • Alvin Padilla-Babilonia (he/him), Assistant Professor at the University of Puerto Rico, School of Law. 
  • Jackie Dugard (she/her), Senior Lecturer at the Columbia University Institute for the Study of Human Rights. 
  • Moderator: Reshard L. Kolabhai (any pronouns), South African LL.M. student at Yale Law School.

Environmental Racism

The Environmental Racism Panel explores RebLaw 2024’s theme of displacement by examining the ways that changes to our natural and built environments are impacting our lives, and how those impacts are unequally distributed. Bringing together lawyers and legal scholars with experience in climate action, climate mitigation, and refugee issues, the panel will feature a discussion of law’s role in creating and perpetuating environmental racism, current work being done in the field, and how law and lawyers might create a more just approach to environmental work.

Speakers:

  • Camila Bustos (she/her),  Assistant Professor at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University. 
  • Monica Iyer (she/her), Clinical Fellow/Senior Lecturing Fellow at Duke Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic.
  • Moderator: Tabitha Sookdeo (she/her), Director of Community Engagement at IRIS-Integrated Refugee & Immigrant Services. 

Housing Justice

The Housing Justice Panel will feature three practitioners in with experience in movements fighting displacement and advancing safe and affordable housing. Our speakers have served and empowered their communities through a variety of means, including organizing unhoused people, unionizing tenants, and providing direct legal and harm reduction services. The panel is designed to uncover common threads and meaningful differences across their work, illustrating a broad range of methods and perspectives powering housing movements today.

Speakers:

  • Anthony Prince (he/him), Lead Organizer and General Counsel for the National Union of the Homeless and the California Homeless Union/Statewide Organizing Council.
  • Sarah White (she/her), Staff Attorney at the Connecticut Fair Housing Center and member of Connecticut NLG. 
  • Moderator: Will Krueger (he/him), third-year law student and advocate in the Yale Law School Housing Clinic.