Reblaw 2009

Rabble? Meet Rouser.
Register for RebLaw 2009: February 20-22

Who: Rabbles + Rousers
What: The Fifteenth Annual Rebellious Lawyering Conference. The RebLaw Conference is an annual, student-run conference that brings together practitioners, law students, and community advocates from around the country to discuss innovative, progressive approaches to law and social change.
Where: Yale Law School, New Haven, CT.
When: Friday, February 20–Sunday, February 22, 2009
Cost: Standard registration is $30. Registration is free for members of the Yale, UConn, New Haven, and Quinnipiac communities.

Register now!

Sign up for e-mail updates about the conference. For info on previous conferences and panels, please visit our archives or read the Reblawg.

Networking Dinners

After hearing keynote speaker Stephen Bright, go out for a bite with others working in your issue area. Tell tales from the trenches, swap tricks of the trade, and brainstorm ways to form regional and nationwide alliances. Dinners will be at nearby New Haven restaurants and cost about $8-12 per attendee. Please let us know if you plan to attend a dinner by indicating yes/no when registering online. Sign-up for specific dinners upon arrival at the conference.

Keynote Speakers

Van Jones – Friday, February 20

Van Jones is founding president of Green For All and a senior fellow with the Center for American Progress. Green for All is a U.S. organization that promotes green-collar jobs and opportunities for the disadvantaged. Its mission is to build an inclusive, green economy – strong enough to resolve the ecological crisis and lift millions of people out of poverty. Van is also a senior fellow with the Center for American Progress and author of The Green Collar Economy (Harper One 2008), a New York Times bestseller. A 1993 Yale Law graduate, Van is committed to creating “green pathways out of poverty” and greatly expanding the coalition fighting global warming.

A champion for the toughest urban constituencies and causes, Van has won many honors, including the 1998 Reebok International Human Rights Award; the International Ashoka Fellowship; selection as a World Economic Forum “Young Global Leader”; the Rockefeller Foundation “Next Generation Leadership” Fellowship; Campaign for America’s Future “Paul Wellstone Award 2008”; the Elle Magazine Green Award 2008; and selection as a TIME Magazine 2008 Environmental Hero.

In 2005, Van produced the “social equity track” for the United Nations’ World Environment Day 2005 summit, which was themed “Green Cities: Plan for the Planet.” As a result of Van’s advocacy, the resulting Accords called upon the world’s mayors to: “Adopt a policy or implement a program that creates environmentally beneficial jobs in slums and/or low-income neighborhoods.”

In 2007, Van helped the City of Oakland pass a “Green Jobs Corps” proposal. The City allocated funds to train Oakland residents in eco-friendly “green-collar jobs.” At the national level, Van worked successfully in 2007 to pass the Green Jobs Act of 2007. That path-breaking, historic legislation authorized $125 million in funding to train 35,000 people a year in green-collar jobs. On September 27, 2008, Green For All worked with national partners to produce “Green Jobs Now,” the first-ever national day of action calling for green-collar jobs in the United States. More than 600 communities in all 50 states participated, with more than 50,000 signing a petition that called for federal government action to spur green jobs.

In 1996, Van co-founded the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, which advocates for juvenile justice reform, police reform, youth violence prevention and green-collar jobs. The Center’s “Books Not Bars” campaign has successfully blocked construction of a super-jail for youth, closed two abusive youth prisons and helped to reduce California’s youth prison population by 30 percent.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Van co-founded Color Of Change. Boasting 400,000 members, Color of Change has become the nation’s biggest online advocacy organization that focuses on African-American issues. Van is also a co-founder of a new national coalition that promotes the idea of a national “Clean Energy Jobs Corps.” This multi-billion-dollar federal initiative would put hundreds of thousands of people to work rewiring and retrofitting the energy infrastructure of the United States. Additionally, Van is a founding board member of the National Apollo Alliance and 1Sky, two national organizations promoting clean energy jobs and climate solutions.

Stephen Bright – Saturday, February 21

Stephen Bright is the president and senior counsel at the Southern Center for Human Rights, a human rights organization that deals with human rights in the criminal justice and prison systems. He served as director of the Center from 1982 through 2005. He has represented people facing the death penalty at trials and on appeals and prisoners in challenges to inhumane conditions and practices; written essays and articles on the right to counsel, racial discrimination in the criminal justice system, judicial independence, and other topics that have appeared in scholarly publications, books, magazines and newspapers; and testified before committees of both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. In addition to Yale, he has taught courses on criminal law and capital punishment at Harvard, the University of Chicago, Emory, Georgetown, Northeastern and other law schools.

The work of the Center and Bright has been the subject of a documentary, Fighting for Life in the Death Belt, (EM Productions 2005), and two books, Proximity to Death by William McFeely (Norton 1999) and Finding Life on Death Row by Kayta Lezin (Northeastern University Press 1999). The Fulton Daily Law Report, a legal newspaper in Georgia, named him “Newsmaker of the Year” in 2003 for his contribution to bringing about creation of a public defender system in Georgia.