Participatory Law Scholarship: A Seat at the (Legal) Table

BERTRALL ROSS: So because this is the first symposium on participatory law scholarship, we could really do whatever we wanted, because there was no blueprint before. So we're actually going to have a second keynote-- introductory opening remarks from Professor Lopez.

And so our next panel is-- our first panel is actually about Professor Lopez's piece, which is co-authored with Mr. Kempis Songster, also known as Ghani, and Professor Gerald Torres. And so before we welcome all of them up, I just want to give a brief introduction to our next speakers.

So Professor Lopez is a professor of law at Thomas R. Kline School of Law at Drexel University. Professor Lopez's research primarily focuses on state responsibility for mass atrocity, transitional justice, and the carceral state with a particular focus on Eighth Amendment jurisprudence. This academic year she's in residence at Princeton University as a fellow in law, ethics, and public policy.

And she's also held visiting fellowships at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. The, I'm going to mess this up, [INAUDIBLE] Center, I'm getting a head nod, for International Law at the University of Cambridge and several other places as well.

Mr. Songster is the co-founder of The Redemption Project. Sorry. He's the Transformative Healing and Restorative Justice Manager at the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth. And in this role, he's helping CFSY to advance transformative and healing justice models across the nation. He's also a founding member of The Right to Redemption, The Redemption Project, and the Coalition to Abolish Death by Incarceration as well as the co-founder and director of the Ubuntu Philadelphia.

Since his release in 2017 after 30 years in prison starting when he was 15 years old, Ghani has emerged as an outspoken voice and visionary in Philadelphia's movement to end mass human caging and to create transformative and restorative responses to harm and violence.

And Professor Gerald Torres is a Professor of Environmental Justice and Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He's a pioneer in the field of environmental law and he's spent his career examining the intrinsic connections between the environment, agricultural and food systems, and social justice. His research into how race and ethnicity impact environmental policy has been influential in the emergence and evolution of the field of environmental justice. Considered a leading scholar in critical race theory as well, Professor Torres's work also includes the study of conflicts over resource management between Native American tribes, states, and the federal government.

And last but certainly not least, we have Professor Bertrall Ross here at UVA, who has graciously offered to moderate this panel. Professor Ross is the Justice Thurgood Marshall distinguished Professor of Law here and the director of the Karsh Center for Law and Democracy. Since joining the law faculty in 2021, he has become a beloved professor here.

He teaches constitutional law, constitutional theory, election law, administrative law, and statutory interpretation. And his research is driven by concern about Democratic responsiveness and accountability, as well as the inclusion of marginalized communities in administrative and political processes. And I don't think Professor Ross wants me to add this last part, but he is also a very, very skilled poker player as well.

[LAUGHTER]

So with that, we would like to invite our panelists up here.

Thank you all for-- Bertie the other folks on the Virginia Law Review, Dennis, everyone. This is a critically important forum that you are providing for an area of scholarship that has finally, I hope, is going to receive its due in terms of its recognition of its importance within not only legal scholarship but within our democracy more broadly.

So I wanted to start by talking about a piece that kind of led this all off. The participatory legal scholarship movement. I think we can mark its beginnings with your earlier piece, your co-authored piece, on redeeming justice. And I wonder if you guys could start by talking a little bit about that article.

KEMPIS SONGSTER: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much, Bertrall. In 2011, just to give you a little backstory, I think we have to situate PLS and the birth of PLS in three different births. One is the birth of Right to Redemption.

And that was a group of human beings or is a group of human beings who convened in 2011 in Graterford State Prison to basically come up with new ideas, think of ways to bring new life, and a recalibration to the fight for parole eligibility for people sentenced to life without parole. In Pennsylvania specifically and in the country more generally. We realized that that fight had been in still waters. It's been very static. The fight to end life without parole was very unpopular.

A lot of the support, understandably so, was going towards folks on death row. And we understand. But we also thought that maybe people didn't fully appreciate that life without parole was just as final as the death penalty. And so we thought that maybe we would have to change two things fundamentally and first of all to kind of right the ship in this fight. And that was come up with a different mindset and a different language. The way we thought and spoke about ourselves and the sentence had to change.

And so we decided to not call the sentence life without parole anymore, because the term was too innocuous and didn't convey the gravity of what we were dealing with. So we decided to call it what is more aptly known as now or more increasingly known as in the state and now by the United Nations death by incarceration. So that was one birth, the birth of right to Redemption. Rachel Lopez some time after would come into Graterford State Prison to do a workshop with a lot of us. And that's how we first met her.

I would come out. I was finally released in 2017, December 28, 2017. We would link up again to take a deep dive into exactly what we meant by Right to Redemption. Because Rachel Lopez being a human rights lawyer had a human rights law perspective on it. And so she was curious. You were curious about how we thought about it. And we found out that we were actually on the same page.

It was because of my orientation by political prisoners, same kind of orientation that my comrade up there, Robert Saleem Holbrook, who you'll hear from later, had been mentored by political prisoners and POWs in Pennsylvania State Prison who had came into the prison system with a human rights perspective or a heavy reliance on human rights because they knew they had no recourse to constitutional law or state law. And they planted those seeds of an appreciation of international law.

Along with Malcolm X, who was a model for transformation for a lot of us. And Malcolm X, he advocated for an embrace of international law or human rights law as opposed to civil law. And so it was that type of consciousness that went into the formation of Right to Redemption and our push for bringing in human rights law in and trying to leverage human rights law in our fight to end death by incarceration.

Over the pandemic, Rachel and I would huddle up in some long conversations over the phone. And the idea for this piece really started to take shape about redeeming justice. How we would write a piece that basically argued that the right to redemption is a human right based on international law and that sentences such as death by incarceration forecloses that right.

And then we looped in Terrell Carter, who was the third co-author. He was still on the inside, still fighting the death by incarceration sentence. And somehow we were able to gel all these voices. We owe it to Rachel. We just presented the pieces. And then she massaged it all together into one cohesive argument. And that's how redeeming justice was born.

And then the third birth is a coalition that was already forming and already doing work together, a coalition made up of organizations like the Abolitionist Law Center, which Robert Saleem Holbrook is the Executive Director, Amistad Law Project, Sentencing Project, Center for Constitutional Rights, Drop LWOP, RAPP, Releasing Aging People in Prison. All these organizations were coming together and trying to think of ways to topple this beast known as death by incarceration.

We were told that the inspiration or a lot of the inspiration for the complaint that was eventually filed in the United Nations, the first ever complaint against death by incarceration, we were told that a lot of the inspiration came from the piece Redeeming Justice. And that was really heartening for us to hear.

Anyway, that complaint took on a life of its own. It led to a lot of us addressing the United Nations. Even a delegation going over to the United Nations, I mean, Geneva, Switzerland to address the United Nations Human Rights Commission on October 17th with Saleem presenting and other people presenting. Directly impacted folks, people with lived experience. That led to the United Nations for the first time ever issuing a statement, a 13 page statement to the US, charging the US with violating human rights by sentencing people to death by incarceration.

So now language that was birthed in the dungeons behind the walls had gone global. You know what I mean? And so those three births right there I think is just important context to understand the soil that PLS, Participatory Law Scholarship, sprouted from.

BERTRALL ROSS: So that leads me, I think you addressed this a lot in your response and that origin story. But want you to convey a little bit more in terms of why this is important, because I think it's important to have people understand it's critical and vital, this, for not only scholarship, that seems minor in terms of its contribution, but for people's lives. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about the importance of participatory legal scholarship. Law scholarship.

KEMPIS SONGSTER: Yeah. I mean, we could probably take up an hour talking about why PLS is important, but I'll just drop this little piece. Just incorporating the voices of those with lived experience brings a context that law as we know it is just devoid of. Sometimes the law can seem so distant from regular people, because we don't see ourselves in it. Not in a good way anyway. We don't hear our voices in it. We don't see our agency in it.

And so for the first time ever, we see this on ramp for people who are voiceless. Whether we're coming from behind prison walls or in other areas where we're marginalized and rendered voiceless, we can bring our lived experience, the lessons that we learn from how we're directly and most harshly impacted by the law in consideration.

It's kind of like what Danielle Sered said when she says in our zero sum system, complexity is a liability. Well, this is an opportunity. It provides an opportunity for complexity of the people that suffer the harshest impacts of the law could be lifted up. And that in itself is a liability to the system, that context. And so it would behoove us to incorporate those voices more.

A lot of times when we read the law, we might read a case law, and it tells a story about how a case happened. This is the name of the person. This is the date that happened. This is how things proceeded in court. This was the outcome. What was missing was everything else. The backstory, the circumstances, the context, the complexity. And that's what PLS attempts to bring is that story.

BERTRALL ROSS: Well, I'll tell you right now that you're filling a huge gap. Because one of the things I hear students talk about quite a bit is the lack of context provided to the cases that they read. They're taught cases too often as rules to be applied and thinking about how you might apply these rules as a lawyer without really understanding or really getting a sense of what the real world consequences of these cases and what they arise from.

Now Ghani, I know that you were the inaugural program director of Healing Futures Philadelphia's first ever restorative justice diversion program for youth. And you recently joined the campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth as their Transformative Healing and Restorative Justice Manager. How does PLS relate to the work to your path-- how does it relate to your past and current work? Excuse me.

KEMPIS SONGSTER: Yeah. Thanks for that question. So my work as the inaugural program manager of Healing Futures. And by the way, Healing Futures is Philadelphia's first restorative justice diversion program for young people, which I did with the Youth Art and Self Empowerment Project.

And what that entails is a referring agency, and in this case, the district attorney's office, sends the cases of young people to. Us or the team that-- I just left them, so us still comes out. Matter of fact, my last day with Healing Futures was March 29th. I mean, February 29th. And my first day with CFSY was March 4th. So I'm still in transition mentally.

But the district attorney sends the cases of young people who were apprehended for some kind of harm to me and my team. And what we did was or what the team still does is prepare that young person over the course of, say, eight weeks of intense meetings and intense preparations and exploration of accountability to come together face to face with the person that they've harmed at a restorative community conference.

A very intimate setting where they faced the person that they've harmed, get to hear from the person how their actions impacted that person, get to hear from their own families how their behavior and actions impacted their own families, and get to hear from members of the community at large of how their actions impact the community at large, but also how valuable they are to the community and the hope that the community has still in this young person.

And then the young person gets a chance to offer an apology or an accountability statement. And then everyone there huddles up and comes up with a restorative plan for how that young person is going to repair the harm as much as possible and make things as right as possible. And that plan could last two to seven months. And when it's done, we let the district attorney's office know and then the case is closed. No criminal record is entered. That could come along later on and haunt this person's ability to get a job later on, get an apartment or a college education.

And then we have a community celebration for every case. Not celebrating that a young person got off softly for causing a harm, but celebrating our own agency as a community to resolve our trespasses against each other without handcuffs and cages.

And so now I'm the Transformative Healing and Restorative Justice Manager with CFSY, which is thinking of ways to advance this kind of model nationwide. And how that's relevant to this work as PLS, because PLS is essentially about transformative justice or how to transform things and create new models of justice or new models of law or interpreting the law or applying the law.

When you look how we go to court when a case happens, for instance, you come in the courtroom. The family of the harmed is on one side. The family of the person who caused the harm or is accused of the harm and they're on one side separated. No one can say anything. No one has a voice. They're partitioned off from the goings on in the courtroom. The only voices you hear are two people arguing for and against both sides. And someone there is sitting literally at a higher altitude than everybody else judging.

And the only utility value that the people have in the courtroom is when they're called on to testify in the interest of what's going on. And whatever happens, whether the case is won or lost according to the perspective of whatever side, everybody's dispensed with. Nobody's checked up on to see how they're healing or recovering from the harm. Everybody collects their paycheck. Close the books on the case. And meanwhile, in the communities that this harm happened in, it stay mired in the kind of situations and conditions that bred to harm.

In a restorative process or in a circle process it's different. Everybody's circled up. Nobody's sitting higher than anybody. There's equality. Everyone has a voice. And it's in a lot of ways, PLS is like restorative or transformative and healing justice in scholarship. You understand what I'm saying?

And I pump the brakes on my use of the-- I only use restorative justice because of lack of a more commonly accessible term. I'm not even a fan of that term. Because what are we restoring things to when a lot of the harm happened in socially toxic environments? And it doesn't address the macro issues that needs to be addressed.

And in a lot of ways, PLS seeks to address that, but in a way that allows all voices to be heard. That allows everyone, even those who are not formally trained in law, those are not lawyers, to have a say in how the law is shaped. And then the effectiveness of that law can be gauged on its impact on the health and well-being of the community. So in a lot of ways, that's similar to the work that I'm doing, just in scholarship.

And the other piece is in the campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth. The campaign is about advocating for the fair treatment of children and that children be judged not as adults but as children.

And so if you look in the piece Redeeming Justice, that's what we talk about. How death by incarceration impacts everyone, but especially young people. And I just don't want to continue to belabor the point. But there is definitely a relationship between PLS and transformative justice. Because what we hope would happen through PLS is that more laws that facilitate transformative justice would come into being, that we would bring that into being.

BERTRALL ROSS: I just want to touch upon a particular point that you were making in your comments. There's been a lot of--

KEMPIS SONGSTER: This question is directed to Rachel, right?

BERTRALL ROSS: I can direct it to Rachel or Professor Torres. I'm sorry. I don't mean to direct it at one person. Anyone can answer any of these questions, of course. But there's been a huge backlash against abolitionism. And I think perhaps one way to explain that backlash to abolitionism is a caricature of that movement and what they are seeking.

And the argument that has been made and could be made by those who seek to caricature it is that the abolitionist movement is trying to abolish responsibility for wrongdoing. They're trying to allow people, as you mentioned, to get off scott free without actually being punished for their action appropriately. And so PLS has a connection to abolitionism.

And I'm wondering if both you can sort of, I don't know, reclaim abolitionism and also talk about how PLS relates to abolitionism, whether it be Gerald or Rachel. We'll give Ghani some time off to recover his voice. But I mean, your words are so powerful and so appreciated. But I wonder if you all could sort of engage sort of that question of relationship between PLS and abolitionism.

GERALD TORRES: Yeah, I'd like to just say one piece, because I think the point you made is right, which is there's been an attempt to caricature abolitionism, the abolition movement. But if you look to the work of people like Ruth Gilmore, what she says and it ties back to what Ghani said, which is what you've got to do is not just eliminate prisons, but you've got to eliminate the conditions that gave rise to the creation of prisons and the idea that incarceration is the solution to the problems that arise because of injustice.

And so it's a complex idea. It's not a simple idea. And the attempts to caricature are an attempt to reduce it to an absurdity. But that's because they don't want to take it seriously. And I think taking it seriously requires two things. One, it requires good faith and it requires a deep inquiry into what it would take to transform society so that abolition makes sense in the way that everyone understands. So I mean, I'll turn it over to Rachel now. I interrupted her to begin with.

RACHEL LOPEZ: I think this picks up on what you wanted to say.

KEMPIS SONGSTER: OK. All right. Yeah, so no, thanks, Gerald. Thanks for lifting up Ruth Wilson Gilmore, because that's who came to my mind in response to your question.

I think the answer to that question also depends too on how we define abolition. Because even in the abolitionist ecosystem, in the abolitionist circles, everybody's not on the same page about what abolition is. You know what I mean?

But I think one thing we can agree on, and I think this is encapsulated really well in Ruth Wilson Gilmore's quote when she says, abolition is about presence, not absence. It's about building life affirming institutions. End quote. It's not just about getting rid of stuff. You what I mean? Because that's how abolitionists kind of summed up, that we're just trying to tear things down, get rid of stuff. You know what I mean?

Of course, that's important. That's a part of it, because you can't build something good on toxic ground. But it's about presence. It's not destructive. It's generative. It's about building life affirming institutions, which is what we hope to build with PLS. An institution that promotes life affirming laws or that brings in the voices of the voiceless to exercise their agency in shaping life affirming laws or laws that affirm life or that affirms the best in what it means to be human. And that's central to abolition.

And also this. Abolition would not be possible without incorporating the voices of those who were directly impacted by slavery, for instance. Those who had lived experience with that. The abolition movement might not have been as powerful as it was without the voice of Frederick Douglass, who was one of the greatest orators and intellects that came out of slavery. But he was a runaway too. You know what I mean? And so he was able to combine his analysis with lived experience, which gave it a different type of power.

Abolition might not have been powerful without the voice of David Walker. I mean, as powerful as it was. Might not have been as powerful as it was or effective as it was without the voice of Sojourner Truth and without the acts of Harriet Tubman and the Maroons, to be quite frank. And so at the same time, it would not have been possible without abolitionist lawyers. You know what I mean? But there has to be a relationship or a participation of both. And that's why participatory law scholarship, I think it relates to abolition in that sense.

BERTRALL ROSS: I want to direct this next question to you, Rachel, although Gerald could also opine on this as well. It's easy for us as legal scholars or law professors to fall into the pattern of we go to our office, we go out and we write in our office, we go out and teach our students, we do service for the institution, and we then rinse, wash, and repeat. You made different choices, especially with how you pursue scholarship. You're not just looking to whatever sources of information that you might find in the books or in the case law or even in the archives if you're a historian. You decided to go out and connect with the real lives of people.

I wanted to ask you about the initiation or the thought process that went into the decision to write this article that you're writing for VLR, but also the article Redeeming Justice that began at all.

RACHEL LOPEZ: It's such a great question. And so much of the work that we're doing I think has inspired a deep critical self-reflection on my own identity as a lawyer and as a law professor and as a legal scholar. Ghani mentioned that my expertise is human rights. And I started my career at UT Law School mostly doing capital punishment defense, trying to get people off death row. And I thought, what more valuable use of my time than helping to get someone off of death row?

And when we celebrated those cases, when we won, people got a life without parole sentence. And for us, that it was a victory. That was one of the greatest victories we could have as an anti death penalty lawyer. And it wasn't until I had through some greater power had the occasion to meet Ghani and Rel and our other comrades that are still at SCI Phoenix now learned the depth of what life without parole, more aptly called death by incarceration, looks like.

And another piece that we wrote regarding the other death penalty, Rel, our co-author, describes the experience of being a hospice care worker and the slow, undignified death that people suffer when they're with people who don't care about them. And what greater cruelty is there than that?

And so I mention this because in a way, this body of work has been a gift to me, an eye opening experience. I realize the deep blind spots that I had at every level as a lawyer, as an academic. And that's part of what birthed all of this, is that this idea that we as academics can only see a portion of the picture, and that people that are bearing the bluntest consequences of law have a deep understanding that helps to fill out a much broader picture that can be informative and transforming the law, which is the ultimate goal of PLS.

GERALD TORRES: I want to thank Rachel, though, for the work she did in the capital penalty clinic. Because in our lifetime, capital punishment is going to be outlawed in the United States. It's not completely outlawed yet, but the work of people who are trying to challenge the penalty of death actually have made great headways. And so you can mark down that I'm predicting that capital punishment will be eliminated in the United States in our lifetime. And that's the work of people like Rachel.

So the movement to challenging death by incarceration or life without parole is the next step in that process of changing the way in which we think about what the purposes of incarceration are or what the uses of incarceration are.

So as far back as, god, it was 1980, I think. Frank Allen wrote an article about the decline of the rehabilitative ideal. And what that article did, essentially, was to say, look, there's been an attitude change in what incarceration is for. So the movement away from rehabilitation into punishment has been the defining feature of the carceral system in the United States for now almost two generations. The transforming of that vision is critical to the process of moving the role of abolition forward.

But I want to note one other point that Rachel made, because the importance of recognizing the partiality of our own vision, we don't what we're not seeing until we talk to other people and get other perspectives and are open to the perspectives that they bring. So one of the things we did was to start the Advancement Project now over 20 years ago when we figured out that the way that racial justice litigation was proceeding wasn't working.

And what we needed to do was to incorporate geographers, criminologists, sociologists, as well as people with GIS capabilities, people in the communities, as well as lawyers and legal scholars to think about how you transform the landscape that we occupy. And so creating constituencies of accountability is one of the things that legal scholarship can do. And it can do it by understanding and making clear to whom we are accountable and to whom the justice system ought to be accountable and to making that play.

And I think that's what PLS does. That's what Lonnie and I were talking about when we talked about demosprudence, which is the people themselves ought to have a voice in this. And so I think I wanted to thank Rachel for her work on the death penalty stuff, because that's in some ways an early paradigmatic case of how you transform what is viewed as acceptable.

BERTRALL ROSS: And I think it's really quite powerful in terms of not only listening, which is a critical component of what we should be doing as lawyers, listening on the ground to those people that are directly implicated and harmed by the law, but you're doing something that's also important. Giving a public platform to those voices.

And so I always tell my students in class that you're going to enter into the world with an extremely privileged status of a law degree. There is so few Americans and people in the world that have this opportunity to have a law degree and to have this potential impact on the world. And you can be part of the process of giving public listening and giving a public platform to the words that you're hearing.

But then the question comes up is, well, how do you do that on a public platform side of things? And I was wondering if all three of you or any one of you could talk about that process of turning these voices into pieces of scholarship that you have in the ways that you have done. The writing process, the challenges associated with it. So that perhaps myself and others in the room can learn from your doing.

GERALD TORRES: Well, I don't know, Rachel, if you all want to talk. I can say for myself, having-- and I miss Lonnie deeply, passed now almost a year and a half ago. But having a critic who pushes you even as you're working out ideas and you who is also committed to the ideas that you're trying to explore and who does it in good faith is, I think, a wonderful thing to have.

The way Lonnie and I would work is we would give talks and then interrogate each other. So we didn't just give a paper that we both agreed with. We'd present ideas that we would then argue about. And we'd argue about in public and then we would invite the audience to argue with us, because we had a sense that the audience that we were speaking to was going to bring-- we wanted them to bring themselves into the conversation and to recognize that they have a stake in the way the ideas get developed. That process is, I think, critical.

Then we wanted to look at how do social movements affect legal change. How do they produce durable legal change? And where do they intervene in the legal process? And how can we as scholars reflect and document and lift up the way in which social movements actually change the idea of what's possible? And what constitutes for lawyers a good argument? What constitutes for judges a different set of conditions against which they can reason?

And so if you look at the legal landscape, you see everywhere that social movements and the organizing people has had an impact on the shape of the law and what courts think is possible, both for good and for ill. I'm not going to say it's all been a one way ratchet. It's for good and for ill. But we need to learn from that process. And that's why I think working with other people and working with a co-author is really helpful.

KEMPIS SONGSTER: I think it's hard to divorce the process, especially for writing this piece, from the conditions within which or under which it was written. Like I said, this piece was written in 2021? No, was it 2020? 2020, Redeeming Justice. Well, at least the conversations that started it. And then when pen first started hitting paper was during the pandemic as well as the George Floyd uprisings.

So it was in the convergence of these two crises that we were having these conversations and the convergence of the containment that the pandemic situated in and then the bursting out of the uprising. And then also we're hearing about what's going on behind the walls, how the state was responding to the pandemic behind the walls, responding to this public health crisis using public safety or punitive measures.

And we were hearing about what a lot of the society wasn't hearing about. A lot of society wasn't hearing about the mental stress aspects of the pandemic, the despair because of what had become in Pennsylvania statewide solitary confinement, sensory deprivation. And we were in communication with folks on the inside. And one of our co-authors was still on the inside dealing with this. Forced in a cell, for instance, with somebody that not only that he didn't know but didn't like.

Where everybody now was stationary. They didn't even have recreation anymore. And the 15 minutes that they were allowed out their cells, they had to make the choice between calling home to a loved one to hear a loved one's voice and let their mothers and let their partners and their relatives how they're doing. They had to make a choice between doing that or taking a shower. You what I mean? You shouldn't have to make that kind of choice between your hygiene and staying connected with your loved ones. But that was the situation.

That aspect of one of the co-authors was situated in. And if he was here, he would testify to the mental atrophy that was happening in him at that time. Folks was putting on weight in their cells because they weren't allowed to exercise anymore. I mean, it was really, really bad. Locked in the cell literally 23 hours and 45 minutes a day for months and months and months and months on end.

So when the idea of Redeeming Justice was pitched to him, it offered him an opportunity to give vent to the despair. It gave him a sense of purpose. It allows his brain cells and his juices to start flowing again. And he would call me and ask me, how did this sound? We only had 15 minutes and every five minutes the recording comes in obnoxiously. This call is from a correctional institution and is subject to monitor and recording. I don't how it is in other states, but that's how it is in Pennsylvania. You know what I mean?

And he would read the pieces to me and I would be like, yeah, this is strong, so on and so forth. Well, all right, well, I'm going to send it to Rachel today. And he would have to-- he would send it through his-- we were allowed tablets. Not the tablets like iPads that we're familiar with out here. It's these thick, brick looking tablets that you had to come out of the cell and plug into a kiosk on the block in order for your email to launch out, in order for you to download emails coming in.

So it's not like could sit in a cell and just communicate with people from your tablet. You had to be let out of the cell in order for it to work. And so he would send his contributions to you that way. And then I would also send my pieces to Rachel through mail and she would massage it all together and knead it all together into that like a dough and bake it.

But it was situated, again, in the pandemic, not just how we were affected by it on the outside, confined to our homes basically, but also what was going on with the uprisings and then hearing about how our folks was treated behind the walls, folks dying behind the walls and stuff like that. And so the process was also fueled by a sense of urgency.

So we can't separate the process from the spirit that went in it. This was not an academical or intellectual exercise. You know what I mean? This was not something where we were just trying to just pontificate about the law. We were trying to launch something into the atmosphere that could save people. You know what I mean? And make change. And so that was part of the process.

BERTRALL ROSS: I like that contrast between pontificating on the law and having impact, which is an important distinction. Which leads me to the form that you chose, which is the law review. And I think that I read this piece as being critical of what's produced in law reviews. And yet you chose that form as a vehicle for PLS. Could you explain that choice? And do you have concerns or, I don't know, optimism about law reviews as the space for connecting people to the law in a much more accessible way?

RACHEL LOPEZ: One thing I think that makes a law review an incredibly important vehicle for the type of ideation that Ghani and I and others who are engaged in PLS are doing is that there's a space when you're operating as an activist in the real world where you're constrained by the audience. You have to appeal to the judge. You have to appeal to the legislature. And to some extent, that limits the possibilities of imagination. Because you're envisioning the audience that's going to receive what you're writing as how you word things, what you choose to put in.

And it's not that that doesn't exist in legal scholarship, but legal scholarship I view as a form for what I call critical legal imagination. There's an ability, and Ghani can talk about this too, prefigurative thinking. What came before the law. And there's not always space for those conversations right when you're trying to get, for example, Rel out on commutation. Those conversations are not at the fore of the priority, and nor should they be.

But legal scholarship creates a place where we can imagine new legal worlds. And that's where I see it as being an incredible vehicle for abolition, for other types of the making of legal meaning that is outside the realms of what we imagine to be possible today. So I see it as, in some ways, despite its many constraints an emancipatory tool or could be used as such. And I think that's one thing that's really important.

That said, I think the next chapter, this has to envision other ways that we can bring the making of legal meaning to new audiences that aren't going to read a 70 page law review article. And that's really, I think, the new frontier for PLS. How do we imagine other vehicles like podcast or other forms for that type of imagination to occur?

KEMPIS SONGSTER: No, I don't have the insights into law reviews and the relevance of them like you and Rachel and maybe Gerald and everyone else here. But the perspective I'm thinking about this and why law reviews are important to these kinds of pieces especially, participatory law scholarship pieces, I think I draw from James Boggs on this one, the late great James Boggs. I mean, a lot of you all might be more familiar with Grace Lee Boggs, his partner, who lived much longer than he did.

But he was a revolutionary and he talked about how there are thousands and thousands of universities across this country that churns out thousands and thousands and thousands of young people who can uphold the status quo, who are trained and educated to be cogs in the wheel, batteries in the matrix, and keep the machine grinding forward with their new energy and constrained imaginations. And these young people might be very skilled at doing that and taking the machine to the next level.

But the ability of these young people to make socially, environmentally, and ecologically responsible decisions haven't been as inspiring over the decades. And the faculty in these universities, they operate with this pragmatic and utilitarian philosophy or mindset that so long as they get their young people to score good grades and graduate, they've done their jobs.

Meanwhile, there has been over the decades not a whole lot of movement on the campuses to change this mindset. But there has been recently. You see a lot of students now, not generally, but you see students now mobilizing and organizing themselves to break free of this, to liberate their imaginations, and imagine another way forward. But I'm thinking that being able to take action through PLS like this in law reviews is a way to kind of fan the flames of this kind of movement in the college setting. You know what I'm saying?

So that young people-- right where young people are, so they could draw on this to sow the seeds of more socially and environmentally and ecologically responsible decision making. And I think that is a way to steal a march, as they would say, steal a march on what appears to be a design to churn out more batteries of the matrix.

We're going to change that. And this symposium is the beginning of that kind of movement. Now, it's just the beginning. So as the years go by, we keep doing this, these seats will fill up. These seats will fill up, and that's the hope and that's the idea.