This course will examine the role of the legal system as an historically-evolved mechanism and codification of the capitalist system, as well as a “relief valve” that functions to contain the social justice movement, especially the struggles of the dispossessed. This course will also consider the part that can be played by legal practitioners in revolutionary societal transformation.
Focusing on both the past (particularly the abolitionist movement and the fugitive slave cases) and the present (particularly the re-establishment of the National Union of the Homeless), this course considers the role of the attorney, legal worker, law student and the un-represented poor in using the legal system to facilitate the development of a self-aware and independent struggle to unify the dispossessed in the direction of systemic change.
Anthony Prince is the General Counsel for the California Homeless Union/Statewide Organizing Council, an attorney in the state of California and the Co-Chair of the California Poor People’s Campaign. He was a founding and leading member of the National Union of the Homeless and its Chicago/Gary Indiana local chapter in … Read More ›
Dave Mitchell is a staff attorney in the eviction defense unit at The Legal Aid Society, where he has worked since moving here 3 years ago from the San Francisco Bay Area.
Before coming east, Dave worked with co-panelist Anthony Prince and the homeless community of Salinas, California on litigation challenging … Read More ›
Karol Ruiz is a case manager and legal service coordinator at New Jersey Reentry Corporation and copresident of Wind of the Spirit. She is bilingual in Spanish and English and she is a Bicultural Human Rights Advocate, Immigration Lawyer, and Reentry Facilitator. Karol is a trusted community liaison skilled in … Read More ›
