This is the year.

This piece was written by Emma Scott and I as a reflection after a week in the desert with " No More Deaths " on the U.S.-Mexican border. “There is nowhere on Earth like the place where we work. It is beautiful beyond telling: harsh, vast, mountainous, remote, rugged, unforgiving, every cliché you can think of and more. I have been humbled countless times by the incredible selflessness and courage of the people that I have met there, and I have been driven nearly out of my head with rage at the utterly heartless economic and political system that drives people to such lengths in order to provide for their families.” – No More Deaths Volunteer This Spring Break, eight Harvard Law students and clinicians travelled to the U.S.-Mexico border to do humanitarian work with No More Deaths. When we signed up, we knew the operation was contentious. We glossed over the details with our parents and felt the need to justify the work we would be doing to our law ...

I really like to write. I find it helps me reflect and focus. Over the last few years, I have written out all of my biggest decisions and worked through the hardest times through my journals. But this year, I also decided to consciously make more of this writing public. It has been hard in some ways because writing is one of the few times I am really alone with myself and my thoughts and sharing some of this means sharing private parts of myself. But I also think that increasing the number of critical discussions and especially reflective ones is something I try to promote, and sharing my writing is my attempt to engage in these discussions with more people. I just updated my blog with some of my writing from our school newspaper. These pieces reflect my changing thoughts on the way I want to engage with the law, law school, and social justice lawyering. As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts! Next up - going to Tuscon, Arizona to do border refugee and humanitarian work ov...

I have spent a lot of time thinking about what I want to do, how I can support the movements and confront the issues I care about, and whether I even want to be a lawyer. For me, working as a lawyer in the United States is complicated by the fact that many problems result not from a lack of enforcement of laws, but rather from unjust laws in the first place. Legal work can be hard to fathom once you realize that most lawyers work to maintain and often enable inequality. As Bill Quigley once stated about lawyers - “we use our training, wealth, and position in society to facilitate commerce without conscience, to accumulate wealth without responsibility, and to serve the needs of corporations over and above the rights and needs of people … yet still, some lawyers can be revolutionaries.” I used to be enamored with the idea of large-scale national and international reforms that could “fix” so many of the local problems I saw. I still believe strongly that our biggest issues m...

       This past weekend, while home visiting my family, I spent a lot of time describing the experiences I have had in Housing Court as a student in the Eviction Defense and Post-Foreclosure Clinic. I explained how the vast majority of tenants facing displacement, and often the imminent prospects of homelessness, do not have a lawyer in court. I explained how frustrating and unethical the judicial processes can feel when judges send the tenant and landlord to “mediation,” but unrepresented tenants are repeatedly accosted in the hallway by the opposing party’s lawyers and pressured into signing binding agreements – agreements where tenants often “consent” to waive their right to appeal and claims against their landlord. And finally, I tried to explain the broader context of gentrification in which these evictions and foreclosures are occurring. In gentrifying communities, tenants who have been living in communities for generations are now being forced to move as pro...

       There are many days within the walls of the law school when I’ve found myself lost and questioning whether getting a legal education was the right decision. Sometimes the distraction comes in the form of classes, meetings, debt, and applications. Other times, the confusion results from the realization that it is often the legal structure and lawyers themselves who serve to marginalize communities I care about and entrench cycles of poverty and criminality.        But then some experience of deep injustice or meaningful interaction reminds me exactly about what this fight is all about and all the passions that led me here in the first place.        Tonight I had one of those experiences speaking to a girl no older than fifteen from the homeless outreach van I was volunteering with. This term, I am doing an independent clinical placement at Rosie’s Place, a homeless shelter in Boston. Every night, Rosie’s Place sends ...

           Over 2.3 million Americans are now incarcerated, with an additional 5 million individuals on parole, making the United States the most incarcerated country in the world. The U.S. now spends $200 billion on the correctional system each year, with some states, like California, devoting more resources to locking-up criminals than educating their children.             This increase in incarceration comes at the heels of a steady decline in violence. According to government statistics, Americans are safer today than at any time in the last forty years. These statistics of course do not account for the incredible violence occurring in American prisons and jails – the Justice Department reported 216,000 victims of sexual assault in US prisons in 2008 and author Christopher Glazek states that “prisoners are the victims of an ideological system that dehumanizes an entire class of human being and pe...