This is the year.

"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor" ( Desmond Tutu) As I'm nearing the end of my summer, many people have been asking what I want to do after I graduate. Here are my thoughts.  I came to law school to learn new tools to address the structural causes of poverty, inequality, and injustice. I have been deeply committed to working on these issues both domestically and internationally throughout my life, and continuously strive to learn ways of engaging with the work I care most about in more effective, creative, and sustainable ways. Many paths converged to bring me to the realization that I wanted to practice as a “movement lawyer,” and more specifically, as a movement lawyer supporting immigrant and low-income African American community empowerment. My experiences in international human rights work, both in Uganda and Myanmar, illuminated the variety of roles lawyers can play – as representatives, advocates...

I just finished my first week in New Orleans and wanted to reflect a little and share my initial impressions about this city. I'd never been here before so I've tried to experience as much of it as I can this first week. I'm spending this part of my summer working at the New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice - a really incredible set of grassroots organizations and team of lawyers. Outside of work, I've biked around much of the city, attended organizing meetings, hung out in Mid-town, the French Quarter, and Frenchmen St., and today went on a tour of the city led by STAND (a grassroots organization of low-income residents and workers in New Orleans).   New Orleans is a beautiful, but also incredibly unjust city. I use the word unjust as opposed to unequal because there are so many barriers stacked against the majority of the residents here that the problems run so much deeper than inequality. Just to throw out a few numbers: 52% of the bl...