Spring 2007 Colloquium

Spring 2007 Colloquium

Law and Community Economic Justice in the 21st Century:
Creating a Vision of Transformative Justice

April 6, 2007 8:45a.m.-5 p.m.
Goldberg Room, Boalt Hall School of Law

This colloquium entitled “”Law and Community Economic Justice in the 21st Century: Creating a Vision of Transformative Justice” will be held on Friday, April 6, 2007 from 9 a.m. -5 p.m. in the Goldberg Room at the University of California at Berkeley, Boalt Hall School of Law and will focus on the latest developments in the community economic justice movement and highlight ways for community lawyers to help push for “accountable development.”

The participants in this colloquium have experience with struggles on the ground in a number of arenas and geographic areas, from the Southeast to the West Coast, and in a number of different contexts and communities. As well as presenting case studies of actual struggles for community economic justice, the colloquium participants will reflect together on the themes of race, class, lawyering and organizing that present challenges to this emerging movement. Finally, the participants will use their experience as a springboard for challenging some of the theoretical wisdom about community lawyering in the new century. The colloquium will conclude with a plan to build a network of community lawyers working for economic and racial justice.

Participants will include some of the leading scholars and practitioners on community economic justice and law including Bill Simon, Stanford Law School; Tony Alfieri, Director of the Center for Ethics and Public Service at the University of Miami School of Law; Angela Harris and Jeff Selbin, Boalt Hall School of Law; Margaretta Lin, East Bay Community Law Center; Scott Cummings, UCLA School of Law; Sheila Foster, Jennifer Gordon, and Brian Glick, Fordham School of Law, and Sameer Ashar, CUNY School of Law, and many of their community partners.

The idea for this colloquium was sparked by the recognition that the strategies and rhetoric often associated with civil rights are no longer successful because of this country’s longstanding lack of interest in structural inequality, the success of conservatives’ attacks on big government and the “welfare state,” and the rightward turn of the judiciary. New strategies that focus on working with communities to leverage their existing resources to gain access to investment can promote internal community mobilization and collaboration with outside institutions to redress economic disparities.