“The New Prosperity Law: Expanding Opportunity and Reducing Inequality – 50 Years After the War on Poverty”
October 16 – 17, 2014
Boalt Hall, UC Berkeley School of Law
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty, which is an important time to reflect on the role that law schools and lawyers have played, and can continue to play, in efforts to reduce inequality and expand opportunity. In the War on Poverty, law schools and lawyers were central actors in a coordinated strategy to end poverty by establishing constitutional protections and substantive rights for the poor. Within a decade of its inception, however, the substantive antipoverty movement gave way to a procedural access to justice agenda. Political battles over resources for legal services were at the heart of this shift, reflecting larger trends of decentralization (from federal to state) and privatization (from the government to the market). As a result, legal antipoverty efforts today are much more local, varied and diffuse than during the War on Poverty.
This symposium will examine lessons from the last fifty years, consider emerging anti-poverty efforts, and identify strategies to reinvigorate the role of law schools and lawyers in a new antipoverty agenda.
Berkeley Law certifies that this activity has been approved for 5.25 hours MCLE credit by the State Bar of California.
2014 Hon. Mario G. Olmos Law & Cultural Diversity Memorial Lecture
Keynote Address By Alan Jenkins
Alan Jenkins is Executive Director of The Opportunity Agenda, a communications, research, and policy organization dedicated to building the national will to expand opportunity for all. Before joining The Opportunity Agenda, Alan was Director of Human Rights at the Ford Foundation, managing over $50 million in grant making annually in the United States and eleven overseas regions. Previously, he served as Assistant to the Solicitor General at the U.S. Department of Justice, where he represented the United States government in constitutional and other litigation before the U.S. Supreme Court. Prior to that, he was Associate Counsel to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., where he defended the rights of low-income communities suffering from exploitation and discrimination.
His other positions have included Assistant Adjunct Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School, Law Clerk to Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun, Law Clerk to U.S. District Court Judge Robert L. Carter, and Coordinator of the Access to Justice Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. Alan serves on the Board of Trustees of the Center for Community Change, the Board of Governors of the New School University, and is a Co-Chair of the American Constitution Society’s Project on the Constitution in the Twenty-First Century. He holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, an M.A. in Media Studies from New School University, and a B.A. in Psychology and Social Relations from Harvard College.
Symposium Sponsors:
