Blake Strode and Oren Nimni

Interested in effective strategies to advance systemic social change? Join us! This lunch event — co-sponsored by the Systemic Justice Project and the Bernard Koteen Office of Public Interest Advising at Harvard Law School — will explore three core elements of systemic change: storytelling, organizing, and movement lawyering, in conversation with Blake Strode, the Executive Director of ArchCity Defenders, and Oren Nimni, the Litigation Director at Rights Behind Bars. The discussion will be grounded in a recent case that Strode and Nimni filed against City Justice Center, a St. Louis jail, for subjecting incarcerated people to excessive macing. Lunch will be provided.

• ArchCity Defenders is a holistic legal advocacy organization that combats the criminalization of poverty and state violence, especially in communities of color.
• Rights Behind Bars is a non-profit legal advocacy organization working alongside incarcerated people to challenge the cruel and inhumane conditions of confinement.
• The Bernard Koteen Office of Public Interest Advising encourages Harvard Law students and alumni to incorporate an ongoing commitment to public service throughout their careers.
• The System Justice Project prepares law students for the challenge of understanding and addressing systemic injustices.

Details

• Date and Time: 9/8/23 – 12:20 – 1:20
• Location: Harvard Law School, Wasserstein 2012
• Lunch Provided 
• Law students and college students in Boston area who would like to attend, please email justice@law.harvard.edu by 9/7/23 for more information (include “SJL Lunch Event” in subject line).

This event is related, and provides an introduction, to a series of systemic justice teach-ins being held at Harvard Law School this fall. Learn more the teach-ins here or at teach-in.org.

Special thanks to Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro.