Time

Teams

Proposal Topic

Zoom Group 1

Zoom Group 1

Summary: In collaboration with Beyond the Bars, Jenny and Caroline are developing components of a working report on the industrial temp labor industry in Miami-Dade County, drawing on both data and lived experience to reveal how the industry exploits vulnerable workers – especially those formerly incarcerated. The report challenges the dominant narrative of temp labor as a benevolent pathway to stability, exposing its ties to systemic precarity and the carceral state to inform organizing efforts and justice-oriented policy.

Zoom Group 1

Summary: Pay-to-stay laws charge people in state jails and prison for housing during their confinement, trapping the formerly incarcerated into cycles of poverty and increasing the potential for recidivism. Campaigns have launched across the country to take these laws off the books; litigation is pending in Idaho, Connecticut, and Florida, and wins have been secured in New Hampshire and Illinois. This project aims to take the campaign to Michigan and employ a series of public records and communications strategies, legislative advocacy, and strategic litigation to repeal Michigan’s pay-to-stay laws.

Zoom Group 1

Summary: The Prisoners’ Lives Matter Pennsylvania Campaign is a bold, statewide initiative working to advance a transformative legislative and cultural agenda that centers the dignity, rights, and humanity of incarcerated people. Our project supports this effort by developing two foundational tools for the campaign: a comprehensive Vision and Strategy Note and a draft Prisoners’ Bill of Rights, which together will ground the campaign’s legal, strategic, and narrative approach to systemic prison reform in Pennsylvania, aligned with international human rights standards.

Zoom Group 2

Zoom Group 1

Summary: We’ve been meeting with advocates, organizers, academics, and individuals involved in disability justice to learn about their efforts to recognize and raise awareness of the history of state-led institutionalization of people with disabilities—such as transforming former institution sites into public walking trails or advocating for grave identification at institution cemeteries. From these conversations, we are gathering best practices and lessons learned to share with others interested in doing similar work in their own communities. 

Zoom Group 2

Summary: The Chamber of Commerce is lobbying the Advisory Committee for a regulation that would force plaintiff lawyers to divulge outside funding sources (TPLF) to the court–and the opposing side. Our project summarizes the harmful effects of such a seemingly innocuous proposal for the key decision maker, the Advisory Committee on Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.

Zoom Group 2

Summary: The Public Service Venture Fund (PSVF) is a Harvard-funded fellowship program designed to help launch students’ public interest careers at the public service organization of their choice, yet funding lags far behind other fellowship programs, and PSVF contains other restrictions on host organizations and projects which constrain students’ public interest career opportunities. Drawing from previous successful student organizing campaigns, we propose a student-led effort to increase funding and broaden the bounds of PSVF to allow for more robust pathways into public service legal careers. 

Zoom Group 2

Summary: The Justice Union (JU) is a collaboration among justice-oriented non-profit legal organizations, lawyers, and law students through discrete, time-sensitive legal research and other supportive projects in response to unfolding crises.