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
Sign up to receive e-mail updates about the conference. For information about previous conferences and panels, please visit our archives or read the Reblawg.
Van Jones is founding president of Green For All and a senior fellow with the Center for American Progress. He is a tireless advocate, commited to creating “green pathways out of poverty” and greatly expanding the coalition fighting global warming.
By promoting green-collar jobs and opportunities for the disadvantaged, Mr. Jones is working to combine solutions to America's two biggest problems: social inequality and environmental destruction. Green For All's mission is to build an inclusive, green economy - strong enough to resolve the ecological crisis and lift millions of people out of poverty. The organization grew out of Van's work creating a “Green Job Corp” in Oakland, California, as part of a program at the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. Van founded the Center in 1996, which promotes alternatives to violence and incarceration, including its successful “Books Not Bars” campaign that has helped reduce California's overall youth prison population by more than 30 percent. Mr. Jones is a 1993 graduate of Yale Law School.
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. Mr. Bright is one of the best-known capital defense lawyers in the country. He has written extensively on the subject of capital punishment and is an ardent spokesperson for the abolitionist movement.
He has also 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. Mr. Bright is currently a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School, but has also taught courses on criminal law and capital punishment at Harvard, the University of Chicago, Emory, Georgetown, Northeastern, and other law schools. Mr. Bright has a B.A. and a J.D from the University of Kentucky.