,1,The Honorable Kimberly S. Budd, the 38th Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, delivers the keynote address at the 2024 Law Day Banquet.
,1,PANEL 2- What Role Should Media Play In Reckoning With Contemporary And Historical Racial Injustice In The U.S.?
This panel aims to explore whether and how the media should figure into a quest for racial justice for historical and contemporary racial injustice. The panelists will discuss how the media shapes national narratives that support, or not, truth, reparation, and justice initiatives while recognizing that the ‘fourth estate” should be held accountable for its own role in perpetuating racial harms. The panelists will share their ideas on how the media can support current efforts to redress racial injustice in the U.S. while drawing from comparative international experiences to recognize the cost of overlooking the role of the media in Transitional Justice processes.
Co-organizers: Center for International Law and Policy at New England Law | Boston, The Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA | School Of Law, and The International Coalition of Sites of Conscience.
MODERATOR:
S. Priya Morley - Director, International Human Rights Clinic & Racial Justice Policy Counsel, Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA Law
PANELISTS:
Alicia Bell - Co-founder, Media 2070
Nia Evans - Freelance Journalist
Alan Jenkins - Professor of Practice, Harvard Law School
Ashley Nelson - Director of Communications, International Coalition of Sites of Conscience
,1,Panel 1- Do Memory Battles About Contemporary And Historical Racial Injustice In The U.S. Undermine The Right To Truth?
This panel explores how local and state efforts to ban books, to forbid education about racism including through critical race theory, as well as to limit the discoverability of online information undermine the right to truth and a full accounting of racial violence both as a historical fact and of contemporary realities. Panelists will explore how this strategic attack signifies a key battle in either promoting or marginalizing a robust memory in the telling of the “American story.” The panel will ask how the outcome of this struggle for memory may shape a national narrative that justifies, or not, reparations and other forms of justice. A comparative look will share how such struggles for memory constitute a critical step in advancing the quest for a true reckoning of past wrongs.
Co-organizers: Center for International Law and Policy at New England Law | Boston, The Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA | School Of Law, and Memria.Org.
Moderator:
Louis Bickford - Co-Founder, Biografika, and CEO/Founder, Memria.org
Panelists:
Taifha Natalee Alexander - Project Director, Critical Race Theory Forward Project, UCLA School of Law
Karlos K. Hill - Regents’ Associate Professor in the Clara Luper Department of African and African American Studies at the University of Oklahoma
Nadine Farid Johnson - Managing Director of PEN America Washington and Free Expression Programs
Clara Ramírez-Barat - Director of the Warren Educational Policies Program, Auschwitz Institute for the Prevention of Genocide
,1,Panel 2: How can the U.S. build a transitional justice process that reckons with corporate complicity in and perpetuation of racial injustice and violence?
As is true in other nations, efforts in the United States to push for racial reckoning rarely focus on the role of the private sector despite the role of companies in historical episodes of racial exploitation and atrocity, which left a legacy that continues to benefit corporations today. This panel explores this theme by discussing how private industry in the U.S. was built on the labor of enslaved Black, Brown, and Indigenous people, which today continues through mass incarceration and prison labor which often amounts to forced labor. The speakers will examine how this contemporary problem arises out of a failure to recognize and interrogate the role played by the private sector to perpetuate racial exploitation and atrocity dating back to the founding of the nation and its economic model. Speakers will offer comparative and recent international efforts to implement robust transitional justice mechanisms to include economic actors complicit in human rights violations to explore the role businesses must play in the U.S. process, including strategies to hold corporations accountable.
Co-organizers: Center for International Law and Policy at New England Law | Boston, The Corporate Accountability Lab and the Tanner Humanities Center at The University of Utah.
MODERATOR:
Avery Kelly-Staff Attorney at Corporate Accountability Lab (CAL)
PANELISTS:
Tatiana Devia-Staff Attorney at Corporate Accountability Lab (CAL) where she leads CAL's Transitional Justice work
Daniel Rosen-writer and justice reform advocate who was incarcerated in both Virginia and Washington, D.C. from 2015 to 2021. Prior to incarceration, Daniel spent almost twenty years in public service, in both the non-profit and governmental sectors.
Anita Sinha-Associate Professor of Law and the Director of the International Human Rights Law Clinic (IHRLC)
Lydia Wright-Associate Director of Civil Litigation at the Promise of Justice Initiative
,1,Transitional Justice in the USA Speakers Series Part II Panel 2: Does Criminal Punishment of Police Contribute or Distract from Societal Reckonings with Racism?
[webinar recorded February 28, 2022]
This panel explores the role of police accountability in racial reckoning in the United States and discusses both the potential benefits and limitations of prosecuting police for racial violence and explores whether criminal accountability has lived up to its promise in other transitioning contexts to offer possible lessons for quests for retributive justice in the United States. In particular, the panel will explore whether criminal accountability has lived up to its promise in other transitioning contexts and what lessons we can learn from those examples that might be applicable in the United States.
Co-organized by the Center for International Law and Policy at New England Law | Boston, the Transitional Justice-Rule of Law Interest Group of the American Society of International Law and the Section on International Human Rights of the Association of American Law Schools
MODERATOR:
Rachel Lopez, Associate Professor of Law, Drexel University, Thomas R. Kline School of Law
PANELISTS:
• Roxanna Altholz, Clinical Professor of Law and Co-Director, International Human Rights Law Clinic, Berkeley Law School
• Nikki Grant, Policy Director and Co-Founder, Amistad Law Project
• Darryl Heller, Director of the IU South Bend Civil Rights Heritage Center and Assistant Professor of Women's and Gender Studies, Indiana University South Bend
• Helen Mack Chang, President and Founder of the Myrna Mack Foundation
Learn more about the series, find additional panel recordings, and register for upcoming events at http://bit.ly/TJintheUSA.