On June 28, ACS hosted its annual panel discussion at the National Press Club reviewing the 2017-2018 Supreme Court Term. Leading experts discussed the Court's noteworthy decisions and analyzed emerging trends.
Welcome:
Caroline Fredrickson, President, American Constitution Society for Law & Policy
Panelists:
Thomas Goldstein, Co-Founder and Publisher of SCOTUSblog, Moderator
Richard Hasen, Chancellor's Professor of Law and Political Science, UC Irvine School of Law
Lenese Herbert, Professor of Law, Howard University School of Law
Ria Tabacco Mar, Senior Staff Attorney, American Civil Liberties Union
Benjamin Sachs, Kestnbaum Professor of Labor and Industry, Harvard Law School
Ilya Shapiro, Senior Fellow in Constitutional Studies, Cato Institute
Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia, Samuel Weiss Faculty Scholar, Clinical Professor of Law, Penn State Law
Karla Pérez, 2018 Equal Justice Works Fellow, gives remarks at the 2018 ACS Convention.
Karla Pérez graduated in May 2018 from the University of Houston Law Center. She was born in Mexico City and immigrated to Houston with her parents when she was two years old. A 2015 graduate of the Baer College of Business and the Honors College at the University of Houston, Pérez worked on immigration issues as an undergraduate and law student in her roles as President of the Youth Empowerment Alliance (an organization for undocumented students), Chairperson of the Mexican American Studies Student Organization, and at internships with the UHLC Immigration Clinic, MALDEF, Tahirih Justice Center, and Baker Ripley. During the 84th Texas Legislature, she was the statewide coordinator of the Texas Tuition Equity Campaign, which successfully protected in-state tuition and state financial aid for undocumented students in Texas. She was named the 2015 Future of Texas honoree by the Austin-based Center for Public Policy Priorities, a recognition awarded to a visionary young leader who is working today to ensure the best Texas for future generations. She has been selected as a 2018 Equal Justice Works Fellow and will be sponsored by Greenberg Traurig, LLP and The Texas Access to Justice Foundation and hosted by the Tahirih Justice Center in Houston, TX where she will represent immigrant women and girls who are survivors of gender-based violence. Pérez is proud to be a DACA beneficiary serving on the national board of United We Dream.
Follow Karla on Twitter - @karla_qp
ACS President Caroline Fredrickson delivers the closing remarks at the ACS 2018 National Convention.
ACS is proud to honor Lauren Fine and Joanna Visser Adjoian, Co-Founders and Co-Directors of the Youth Sentencing & Reentry Project (YSRP), with the David Carliner Public Interest Award. The award, given annually, honors a mid-career public interest attorney whose work best exemplifies David Carliner's legacy of fearless, uncompromising, and creative advocacy on behalf of marginalized people.
YSRP works to keep children out of adult jails and prisons, and to bring home people who were sentenced as children to live in prison without the possibility of parole ("juvenile lifers"). Since founding YSRP in 2014, Lauren and Joanna have applied creative and effective strategies to Pennsylvania's unjust juvenile justice system. Their team represents young people who face charges in the adult criminal justice system and in 92% of their cases, YSRP has prevented their clients from going to adult prison. Additionally, they have led a successful campaign to end Philadelphia's practice of charging parents for the cost of their children's incarceration, created a multi-disciplinary pro bono project at the University of Pennsylvania (the Youth Advocacy Project) that has trained and supervised some 70 law and social work students to wrk in teams on behalf of youth charged as adults in Philadelphia, and created an infrastructure for providing mitigation and reentry planning for juvenile lifers in Philadelphia.
The Trump Administration made immigrants and immigration policy a central focus of its agenda on day one when it issued its first executive order barring admission into the U.S. from certain predominantly Muslim countries and suspending all refugee admissions. As that order and its successors have made their way to the Supreme Court for review this Term, the administration has also brought litigation against sanctuary states, rescinded the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, increased ICE enforcement activities at courthouses and sensitive locations, and talked about reshaping our immigrant admissions systems to prioritize "merit" over family ties.
Featuring:
Dara Lind, Senior Reporter, Vox
Muzaffar Chichi, Director, Migration Policy Institute's Office at NYU School of Law
Jacinta Ma, Director of Policy and Advocacy, National Immigration Forum
Hon. Alejandro Mayorías, Partner, WilmerHale; Former Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security
Jonathan Miller, Chief of the Public Protection and Advocacy Bureau, Massachusetts Attorney General's Office
Increasingly, states are attempting to shut down local innovation through preemptive legislation that overrides local lawmaking - threatening to withhold state funding from sanctuary cities, precluding civil rights protections for LGBTQ citizens, prohibiting cities form raising the minimum wage for their workers, and blocking gun violence prevention laws. Critics argue that these efforts are stifling local democracy. IN some cases, preemption efforts have even gone so far as to impose criminal liability on city officials who merely vote for progressive legal reforms. How widespread is this aggressive campaign of state preemption and what legal strategies are available to cities to fight back?
Featuring:
Nestor Davidson, Albert A. Walsh Chair in Real Estate, Land Use and Property Law, Fordham University School of Law
Olatunde Johnson, Jerome B. Sherman Professor of Law, Columbia Law School
Hon. Jon Russell, Director, American City County Exchange; Councilman, Town of Culpeper, Virginia
Ames Simmons, Director of Transgender Policy, Equality North America
Adam Skaggs, Chief Counsel, Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence
