8th Annual Shaping Justice Conference: (De)Criminalizing Poverty

12:30-1:45 p.m. 

Caplin Pavilion; doors open at 12:15 p.m. This event is open to the Law School community only with advanced registration.

Lunch and Panel 
De-criminalizing Poverty: Victories and Challenges 

Welcoming Remarks and Presentation of the 8th Annual Shaping Justice Alumni Awards

• Risa Goluboff, Dean, Arnold H. Leon Professor of Law, Professor of History, University of Virginia School of Law

Plenary Panel

• Eddie Harris, Community Organizer and Founder, Vinegar Hill Magazine
• Tianna Mays, Associate Director for Criminal Justice Project, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law
• Emily Ponder Williams ’14, Managing Attorney, Civil Defense Practice, Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem
• Moderator: Annie Kim ’99, Assistant Professor of Law, General Faculty; Director, Program in Law and Public Service; University of Virginia School of Law

2-3:15 p.m.

Session I: Criminalization and the Right to Housing

Walter Brown Hall 129 (WB129)

• Eric Dunn, Director of Litigation, National Housing Law Project
  
  Dunn will present a training session on the collateral consequences of criminal justice system involvement on affordable housing and how students can help prospective clients navigate these issues. This session will be capped at the first 16 student registrants to ensure time for Q&A.

Session II: Creative Solutions to the Criminalization of Poverty 

Purcell Reading Room

• Mary Mergler ’07, National Campaigns and Advocacy Deputy Director, Fines & Fees Justice Center 
• Kelly Orians, Assistant Professor of Law, General Faculty; Director, Decarceration and Community Reentry Clinic; University of Virginia School of Law
• Levar Stoney, Mayor, City of Richmond, Virginia 
• Moderator: Chinh Q. Le ’00, Visiting Professor of Practice; Distinguished Fellow, Karsh Center for Law and Democracy; University of Virginia School of Law

3:30-4:30 p.m.

Caplin Pavilion

Keynote Address and Reception: “The Punishment Bureaucracy and the Failure of ‘Criminal Justice Reform’”

• Alec Karakatsanis, Founder, Civil Rights Corps; Author, “Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System”

Keynote Speaker

Alec Karakatsanis is the founder of Civil Rights Corps, a nonprofit “dedicated to challenging systemic injustice.” Before founding Civil Rights Corps, Karakatsanis was a civil rights lawyer and public defender with the Special Litigation Division of the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia; a federal public defender in Alabama, representing impoverished people accused of federal crimes; and co-founder of the nonprofit organization Equal Justice Under Law.

Karakatsanis has been a leader in designing new legal, advocacy, and narrative strategies for challenging pretrial detention, cash bail and other illegal and harmful practices in the criminal justice system.

A recipient of the 2023 John F. Kennedy New Frontier Award, Karakatsanis has also received the Trial Lawyer of the Year Award from Public Justice and the Stephen B. Bright Award for contributions to indigent defense in the South from Gideon’s Promise. His work at Civil Rights Corps challenging the money bail system in California was honored with the Champion of Public Defense Award by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. 

Karakatsanis graduated from Yale College in 2005 with a degree in ethics, politics and economics and Harvard Law School in 2008, where he was a Supreme Court chair of the Harvard Law Review. He is the author of the book “Usual Cruelty.”

Award Recipients and Other Participants

Eric Dunn joined the National Housing Law Project in 2018 after serving as a legal aid attorney for the Legal Aid and Defender Association of Detroit (2001-05) and the Northwest Justice Project (2005-2016), and as a lobbyist and statewide housing advocate for the Virginia Poverty Law Center (2016-18). Dunn has been an advocate on rental housing admission issues and on improving protections against eviction or termination from subsidized housing programs. During the COVID-19 pandemic, when the U.S. faced a threat of more than 20 million evictions, Dunn helped lead and coordinate the work of housing advocates nationwide who helped prevent mass evictions. Dunn is a graduate of the University of Michigan and University of Louisville Brandeis School of Law.

Risa Goluboff, the first female dean of the University of Virginia School of Law, is a nationally renowned legal historian whose scholarship and teaching focuses on American constitutional and civil rights law, and especially their historical development in the 20th century. Goluboff is the author of the award-winning books “The Lost Promise of Civil Rights” and “Vagrant Nation: Police Power, Constitutional Change, and the Making of the 1960s.” She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Law Institute, and host of the podcast “Common Law.” Goluboff also is a member of the Equal Justice Works board of directors and chairs the advisory board of the Karsh Institute of Democracy.

Eddie Harris works at ReadyKids, a local nonprofit, where he has been senior parent educator with the Real Dads Program for 17 years. Real Dads is a fatherhood support program with a focus on fathers coming from incarceration. In 2012, he founded Vinegar Hill Magazine to give the Charlottesville community a more complete view of Black life and to support individuals and organizations that focus on growth and development for all. Harris writes that he is “a strong supporter and advocate for our returning citizens striving for change.”

Annie Kim ’99 directs the Program in Law and Public Service at the Law School. Before joining the teaching faculty full-time, she led the Mortimer Caplin Public Service Center as assistant dean for public service. Prior to joining the Law School, Kim practiced for 12 years as a litigator and in-house counsel, representing Virginia school districts and local governments. Kim has served in many leadership positions with the Virginia State Bar and the Local Government Attorneys of Virginia. Her first poetry collection, “Into the Cyclorama,” won the 2015 Michael Waters Poetry Prize, and her second book, “Eros, Unbroken,” won the 2019 Washington Poetry Prize and 2021 Library of Virginia Literary Award for Poetry.

Chinh Le ’00 is a visiting professor of practice at the Law School and a Distinguished Fellow at the school’s Karsh Center for Law and Democracy. From 2011 to 2021, he served as legal director of the Legal Aid Society of the District of Columbia. Prior to joining Legal Aid, Le was director of the division on civil rights in the office of the New Jersey Attorney General, where he led the state’s enforcement of state and federal civil rights and family leave laws. Le is a member of the board of directors of the Poverty and Race Research Action Council and the board of advisers of the Center on Asian Americans and the Law at Fordham Law.

Jonathan Lowy ’88 founded Global Action on Gun Violence in 2022 after litigating and advocating for gun violence prevention in the United States for over 25 years. He has represented dozens of government entities, including the government of Mexico, New York City, Boston and Los Angeles. He has litigated in trial and appellate courts in over 40 states, helped win over $100 million in verdicts and settlements for victims of gun violence, created groundbreaking precedent that holds gun companies accountable for their contribution to gun violence, reformed gun industry practices and shut down reckless gun dealers.

Tianna Mays is associate director for the Criminal Justice Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. Prior to joining the Lawyers’ Committee, Mays was managing attorney at the Maryland Coalition Against Sexual Assault’s Sexual Assault Legal Institute. As managing attorney, she was a member of the Maryland Attorney General’s Office Sexual Assault Evidence Kit Committee, and assisted with obtaining funding for the testing of Maryland’s backlogged rape kits. She also filed and litigated the first rape survivor case in Maryland, assisting a teenage mother in terminating the parental rights of the man who assaulted her.

Mary Mergler ’07 is the national advocacy and campaigns deputy director at the Fines and Fees Justice Center, leading the national Free to Drive campaign to end debt-based license suspensions and supporting state advocacy campaigns to reform fines and fees across the country. Prior to joining FFJC, Mergler spent nearly a decade at Texas Appleseed advocating for criminal legal system reform in Texas, including leading state and local level campaigns to end the criminalization of poverty through reforms of fines, fees and driver’s license suspensions.

Kelly Orians, an expert on helping formerly incarcerated people reenter society and prevent recidivism, directs the Decarceration and Community Reentry Clinic at the Law School. Her scholarship has focused on the collateral consequences of arrests, convictions and incarceration, as well as the history and impact of sentencing reform and prisoner reentry reform. Orians has received the Richard Cornuelle Award for Social Entrepreneurship from the Manhattan Institute, a fellowship from the Global Good Fund and the Michael Rubinger Fellowship for Community Development from the Local Initiatives Support Corporation. In 2019 she was named a “Leader in Law” by New Orleans City Business, and in 2020 she was awarded the J.M.K Innovation Prize from The J.M. Kaplan Fund. Orians is a member of the Louisiana State Bar, where she continues to practice in the areas of post-conviction, parole and civil rights.

Levar M. Stoney is serving his second term as the 80th mayor of the city of Richmond. He serves as an advisory board member of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, where he chairs the Children, Health and Human Services Committee. He also serves as president of the Democratic Mayors Association. Stoney served as the executive director of the Democratic Party of Virginia in 2008 and then as deputy campaign manager for Terry McAuliffe’s successful gubernatorial campaign in 2013. In 2014, Stoney became the first African American secretary of the commonwealth.

Emily Ponder Williams ’14 is a managing attorney in the Civil Defense Practice at Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem. She leads a team of 30 attorneys and advocates working to address the collateral consequences of contact with the criminal legal and child welfare systems. In addition, Williams is an adjunct professor of clinical law at New York University School of Law, where she established and teaches a course focused on police accountability. Williams has also served as a staff attorney and supervising attorney at NDS. Prior to joining NDS, Williams was a fellow in the Civil Action Practice at The Bronx Defenders.