2016 Rebellious Lawyering Conference: “Celebrating the Work of Bill Ong Hing”
San Francisco, California (May 19 – 20, 2016)
PREVIEW: Conference Program
Dear Friends,
We are happy to report that registration for the 2016 Rebellious Lawyering Conference: “Celebrating the Work of Bill Ong Hing” is now open! We thought you’d also like to see a preview of our Conference Program. We are still making modest modifications, but this will give you a very strong idea of just how compelling our line-up of panelists will be. Please find more information on both registration and our panelists attached and below.
Thanks for sharing our excitement. We’re very much looking forward to seeing you all very soon!
– The Conference Organizers (Eric Cohen, Tara Ford, Gerald López, Shauna Marshall, Wendell Tong)
“CELEBRATING THE WORK OF BILL ONG HING”
Registration Link: http://www.ilrc.org/trainings-webinars/seminars/rebellious-lawyering-conference-celebrating-the-work-of-bill-ong-hing
Registration Fees:
- Law Students, Panelists, and Attendees Earning Less Than $50,000/year – Fee: free
- All Other Attendees – Fee: $75
Registration Instructions: For those who qualify for free registration, please press “Add to Cart” on the Registration Page from the link, and then enter the following code in the “Coupon Discount” box: RLC2016 during Checkout to completely discount the $75 conference fee.
Conference Location: University of California, Hastings College of the Law
Alumni Resource Center
200 McAllister Street, 2nd Floor
San Francisco, CA 94102
Conference Dates: May 19-20, 2016
Conference Sponsors: Rebellious Lawyering Institute
Immigrant Legal Resource Center (ILRC)
Pegasus Legal Services for Children
SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT
Please join us on Thursday evening, May 19th, at the end of the first day of the conference, to hear Keynote Speaker Bill Ong Hing, at the ILRC’s 2016 Phillip Burton Awards! Celebrate Bill and the phenomenal organization he founded.
For Tickets and more information visit: http://www.ilrc.org/2016PhillipBurtonAwards.
Conference Materials: For all those registered, a comprehensive reader is available on-line, including a wide range of interdisciplinary and popular materials, some of which will be assigned in advance of the Conference. Please find the link and password to the reading materials below:
Link: http://libguides.law.ucla.edu/rebelliouslawyering
Password (case-sensitive): reblaw2016SF
MCLE Credits Available: The ILRC is a State Bar of California approved MCLE provider. Rebellious Lawyering Conference attendees will receive a total of 5.5 hours of CLE credit for May 19, 2016. Please Note: 1.0 of those hour will count towards Recognition and Elimination of Racial Bias in the Legal Profession and Society CLE. Rebellious Lawyering Conference attendees will receive a total of 3.5 hours for May 20. 2016. Please Note: 1.0 of those hours will count towards Ethics CLE.
Thursday, May 19, 2016
- Working With and Within Institutions (8:30 a.m. – 10:15 a.m.)
Panelists:
- William Kennedy, Law Office of William Kennedy
- Andrea Matsuoka, Staff Attorney, Legal Services of Northern California
- Tammi Wong, Attorney, Office for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education.
People often speak and write about working ambitiously and effectively with and within institutions. In the rebellious vision of problem solving, doing so proves pivotal to understanding and realizing changes we often pursue. What does it mean to join an institution like Legal Services of Northern California (LSNC), at once learning about its dynamics and discovering the many other institutions your clients must routinely deal with? What does it mean to arrive at an institution like the Office of Civil Rights to learn about, to assess, and perhaps to aim to its institutional culture – all while you’re in some ways becoming part of it all? What does it mean to leave an institution you have for decades helped lead and launch your own law practice? In what concrete ways does your knowledge of the many institutions in Northern California – and far beyond – enhance or interfere with your practice-building efforts?
- Break (10:15 a.m. – 10:30 a.m.)
III. “Original Gangstas” (“Rebels”) – The Origins and Early Years of the ILRC (10:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.)
Panelists:
- Kathy Brady, Senior Staff Attorney, Immigrant Legal Resource Center
- Eric Cohen, Executive Director, Immigrant Legal Resource Center
- Mark Silverman, Senior Staff Attorney, Immigrant Legal Resource Center
Founded by Bill Ong Hing, the Immigrant Legal Resource Center started as a small organization – a small organization with huge aspirations in working with immigrants and immigrant communities. How do three of the first lawyers remember the early years? In working with immigrants and immigrant communities and community-based organizations and service agencies, how did they leverage resources to do so much with so little? How did they each help cover all the duties the ILRC shouldered and still begin focusing on unfolding demands and ever-new aspirations? Before there was even a term like “Crim/Imm,” what led Kathy Brady to concentrate some of her time on the hugely important overlap and interaction between the criminal and the immigration systems? What led Mark Silverman to work with groups of immigrants through methods and with aspirations more typically associated with the best rebellious organizers? What led Eric Cohen, especially in his work in East Palo Alto and California’s Central Valley, to work with immigrant communities developing outreach, education, and mobilization campaigns? To work with organizers and others in voter registration and civic engagement campaigns? And to further develop and implement “group processing methodology” to help immigrants take advantage of the legalization provisions of the 1986 Immigration and Reform Act (IRCA) – a methodology now widely employed in naturalization applications? In those early years, did Kathy, Mark, or Eric ever imagine the ILRC would wield the influence it now does, not just in California but across the nation and beyond?
- Lunch Break (12:30 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.)
- Inside The Beast (2:00 p.m. – 3:45 pm)
Panelists:
- Stephen Carpenter, Deputy Director and Senior Staff Attorney, Farmers’ Legal Action Group (FLAG)
- Laura E. Gómez, Professor, UCLA School of Law, UCLA Department of Sociology, UCLA Chicana/Chicano Studies (From 2013-2015, Served as Vice Dean Faculty Development, UCLA School of Law. Original Founder and First Co-Director UCLA’s Critical Race Studies Program)
What does discrimination look like from inside the beast? In recent years, we have made valuable advances in understanding the pervasiveness and nature of tacit bias and in exploring the relationship between explicit and implicit prejudice. But it’s accurate to say we always know too little – even far too little – about how discrimination works within systems, institutions, organizations, relationships. How has discrimination worked in agricultural lending? In faculty hiring and promotion in legal education? In what students face in K-12? In the criminal justice system? How much happens through seemingly mundane decisions? To what degree does behind-closed-doors rhetoric overlap speechifying in the current presidential primaries? In what ways has discrimination mutated over the past several decades?
SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT
After the final panel of our Conference’s first day, please join us to hear Keynote Speaker Bill Ong Hing, at the ILRC’s 2016 Phillip Burton Awards!
For Tickets and more information visit: http://www.ilrc.org/2016PhillipBurtonAwards.
Friday, May 20, 2016:
- Taking Stock? – Rattling Cages? (9:30 a.m. –11:30 am)
Panelists:
- Tara Ford, Co-Founder and Attorney, Pegasus Legal Services for Children; Senior Attorney, Young Minds Advocacy
- Stacey Hawver, Executive Director, Legal Aid Society of San Mateo County
- Shauna Marshall, Professor of Law Emerita and Former Academic Dean, UC Hastings College of the Law
Taking stock – on a routine basis – is central to the rebellious vision of problem solving. What does that look like in May 2016 for the Co-Founder and attorney at Pegasus Legal Services for Children in Albuquerque, New Mexico? For the Executive Director of Legal Aid in San Mateo County? For the Former Academic Dean at UC Hastings College of Law and an influential member of the California State Bar Committee that recommended requiring 15 experiential units to qualify to take the California bar, only to have the California Supreme Court choose to reduce the required number of units from 15 to 6 – the same number already demanded by the American Bar Association? Is everything business as usual – only with a somewhat heightened sense of urgency? Or is cage rattling (yes, a revolution, of sorts) long overdue?
- Lunch Break (11:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.)
III. Immigration – Across Generations (1:00 p.m. – 2:30 pm)
Panelists:
(Invited Panelists Still Finalizing Calendars)
In large number of settings across the country, we have seen and currently experience gaps between generations. In how we define and address problems, in what we regard as ethical and unethical, in how we evaluate the impact of our efforts. Look across a wide range of phenomena: Law Enforcement. Mass Incarceration. Healthy Food. Social Media. Social Movements. What about immigration? To what extent and in what particular ways do today’s young social activists part ways with older generations? Does today’s generation differ with those who came before them in how exactly they think we should take into account the desires and needs of immigrants themselves? In how law offices of every sort and lawyers in public, private, and non-profit settings should regard their working relationships with immigrants and immigrant communities? In how legal organizations and lawyers deal with the brute fact that they operate within a larger ideological world where undocumented and documented migration routinely serves some and massively exploits others? In how we connect particularized “technical work” with ever-widening circles of what is going one locally, nationally, globally?
- Break (2:30 p.m. – 2:45 p.m.)
- What Do Sports, Art, Music, Design, and Poetry Have To Do With It? (2:45 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.)
Panelists:
(Invited Panelists Still Finalizing Calendars)
Sports, art, music, music, design, and poetry – and so many other indispensable human pursuits – are hugely important on their own terms and as ways to enhance and sharpen the quality of our work. Yet these ways of expressing of ourselves are far too often pushed to the side or totally neglected when lawyers (and others) “speak seriously” about their practices. In the rebellious vision, we routinely tap into all human pursuits, yes, to lead healthier lives and, yes, to improve our lawyering and the larger worlds of problem solving of which lawyers are only a part. We enhance our understanding of how communities build themselves, rebuild themselves, carrying forward some traditions, challenging others, offering new insights about who we are and who we can be. In what ways do we open and in what concrete ways have we and might we celebrate all those who make such huge contributions to our work and our lives? To what it means to foster tenderness, fierceness, resilience, appreciation, joy? To what it takes to begin to see that lawyering itself, at least at its best, can be an aesthetic and creative achievement?
Conference Organizers:
Eric Cohen, J.D.
Executive Director
Immigrant Legal Resource Center
San Francisco, CA
Eric is the ILRC’S Executive Director and has been with the ILRC since 1988. For six years while at the ILRC, Eric was a co-supervisor of Stanford Law School’s Immigration Law Clinic. Eric has extensive experience training attorneys and law students. In fact, he has been on the faculty of over 75 CLE trainings. Eric has co-authored several of the ILRC’s manuals and other publications, including Motions to Suppress, Naturalization and U.S Citizenship: The Essential Legal Guide, and How to Successfully Appeal Naturalization Denials. For nearly 20 years Eric has served as a liaison between community groups and the CIS (Citizenship and Immigration Services). He helped develop ILRC’s community model for effectively processing naturalization applications and works with community organizers and others on voter education and civic engagement campaigns.
Tara Ford, J.D.
Co-Founder and Attorney Senior Attorney
Pegasus Legal Services for Children Young Minds Advocacy
Albuquerque, NM San Francisco, CA
Tara has been involved in children’s legal issues for over twenty years. Before going to law school, she worked with children and families at Peanut Butter and Jelly Therapeutic Pre-School, an intensive interactive parenting program. Since 1993, she has continued her focus on issues related to children, families and poverty. She was the co-founder of Pegasus Legal Services for Children, a non-profit law firm serving children and their families in New Mexico. Since moving to California in 2013, she has continued to work as the Legal Director for Pegasus. She is now also working as a Senior Attorney for Young Minds Advocacy, a non-profit organization that improves the mental health services available to young people. Tara has focused her career on issues impacting children, including special education, health care, mental health care and child welfare.
Gerald P. López, J.D.
Professor of Law
UCLA School of Law
Gerald P. López is Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law, where he is faculty member of the Critical Race Program. He teaches Rebellious Lawyering Clinic, Legal Analysis Workshop, Civil Rights Litigation Clinic, Transforming Legal Education Workshop, Community Outreach, Education, and Organizing Clinic, Economic Development Clinic, and Problem-Solving Workshop. López has been one of the nation’s leading theorists about lawyering as problem-solving, developing the “rebellious vision” of progressive practice, not just for lawyers but for every individual and institution engaged in problem-solving work. With diverse collaborators, including his current and former students, he engages regularly in civil rights litigation, diverse work with immigrants, with those incarcerated and living with criminal convictions, with those pursuing economic development projects, with those aiming radically to improve education (including legal education), and with those building and sustaining organizing campaigns and social movements. Before returning to UCLA, López was Clinical Professor of Law at New York University and the Kenneth and Harle Montgomery Professor of Public Interest Law at Stanford University. He co-founded at Stanford the Lawyering for Social Change Program and at UCLA the Program in Public Interest Law and Policy, among the nation’s very first sequenced curricula training future progressive practitioners. At New York University, he founded the Center for Community Problem-Solving in New York City, dedicated to working with low-income, of color, and immigrant communities. And in his early years in San Diego, California, he was a founding partner of Jones, Cazares, Adler, and López, a radical storefront law office. He is the author of Rebellious Lawyering, an influential book about radical law practice as part of community problem-solving, and many community-focused books and scholarly articles on race, problem-solving, immigration, legal education, health, financial literacy, workplace justice, political and constitutional theory, legal analysis, and still more. He has been honored with many community, civil rights, writing, and teaching awards.
Shauna Marshall, J.D.
Professor of Law and Academic Dean
UC Hastings College of the Law
Shauna Marshall joined the Hastings faculty in 1994 as a Clinical Law Professor. Prior to joining the faculty, she spent 15 years working on behalf of the public interest. She began her career as a trial attorney for the US Department of Justice, Antitrust Division. Five years later, she joined Equal Rights Advocates as a staff attorney working on impact cases, policy initiatives and mobilizing campaigns on behalf of low income women and women of color. She then spent four years in the Stanford and East Palo Alto community, lecturing in the areas of civil rights and community law practice at Stanford Law School and directing the East Palo Alto Community Law Project. She served as Hastings Associate Academic Dean from 2000 – 2002 and Academic Dean from 2005 – 2013. She stepped down as Academic Dean in 2013 and joined the emeritus faculty in 2014. Professor Marshall writes in the area of community law practice and social justice. Professor Marshall’s greatest joy is mentoring future social justice advocates. In her new semi-retired role, she is able to meet former students for lunch, a drink or a cup of coffee and learn about the amazing work they do with their UC Hastings degree.
Wendell Y. Tong, J.D.
Counsel to the Firm
Sullivan Papain Block McGrath & Cannavo PC
Wendell Y. Tong is Counsel to the Firm with Sullivan Papain Block McGrath & Cannavo PC, one of New York’s oldest plaintiffs’ personal injury law firms. Her practice areas are toxic torts, products liability, and mass torts. Her clients are working people who have been injured by consumer products that, due to design defects or failure to warn, should never have been sold. She has litigated cases against manufacturers of pharmaceutical drugs, medical devices, unreasonably flammable products, and industrial equipment. As part of the plaintiffs’ co-liaison counsel team in the World Trade Center Disaster Site Litigation, Wendell has represented 9/11 rescue and recovery workers who had not been provided with respiratory protection equipment and subsequently became afflicted with severe injuries. Wendell graduated from the UCLA School of Law in 2000 after earning a B.A. from Brown University and M.A. from Columbia University, both in comparative literature (English, Chinese, Japanese, and Spanish).
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