Zenande Booi and Dominique Bravo are feeling optimistic about the spring 2022 semester—and beyond—as they join the Fordham Law School community in their new positions at the Center of Race, Law and Justice.
Booi was named the Center’s executive director in January, and Bravo was appointed associate executive director in October. Both have been making introductions to faculty, alumni, and students and sharing their experiences, careers, and goals.
“The Center of Race, Law and Justice is lucky to have them both, given Zenande’s work as a senior researcher for the Social Justice Coalition, and then later as a lead researcher for the Land and Accountability Research Centre—both in South Africa—and Dominique’s work with a number of social justice organizations here in the United States,” said Fordham Law Professor Bennett Capers, who serves as the faculty director of the Center on Race, Law and Justice. “Having Zenande and Dominique here gives the Center the bandwidth to do even more in addressing racial inequality and make a real world difference.”
Returning to Fordham Law
Booi received her law degree from the University of Cape Town and clerked for the Honorable Deputy Chief Justice Dikgang Moseneke of the Constitutional Court of South Africa. Upon graduation, she also served as a senior researcher for the Social Justice Coalition in Cape Town, where she worked on issues related to access to dignified sanitation in informal settlements across the city. She came to the United States a year later and earned her master’s degree in International Legal Studies from Georgetown University Law Center in 2016.
Although ready to return to South Africa, Booi decided to take a chance to remain in the United States by applying for the Crowley Fellowship at Fordham Law’s Leitner Center for International Law and Justice. Upon her acceptance, she began conducting desk and field research into issues related to governance and land rights in rural South African communities. A delegation from Fordham Law—consisting of Booi, Fordham Law Professor Jeanmarie Fenrich, and six Leitner students—traveled to South Africa for two weeks in May 2017 to research how issues of land rights and traditional governance manifest in rural South African communities in the Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal, Gauteng, and the Western Cape. The group conducted interviews with community members and activists, representatives from community based organizations and NGOs, members of parliament, government officials, traditional authorities, and academics, all of whose expertise contextualized and informed deeper understandings of the issues.
Booi went back home following her 18-month-long experience with the Leitner Center and became lead researcher for the Land and Accountability Research Centre in Cape Town. There, she continued the work she began at Fordham Law and worked directly with communities, activist partners, universities, government entities, and law firms on issues relating to the protection of land rights. In that role, Booi highlighted the privileging of extractive and other industries over protection of communities’ land rights, the dispossession of poor Black communities without their consent or compensation, and made numerous appeals to the Parliament of South Africa arguing for the land rights of rural communities in South Africa’s former-homeland areas.
Booi is excited to return to Fordham Law in this new role. “Through the Crowley Fellowship I was given the opportunity to not only make connections with Americans and those working in a social justice context, but with students and organizations within Fordham Law as well,” said Booi. “I feel as if I still have the tools to make real connections with the student body, which I think is really important for the Center.”
A New Face at Fordham Law
Bravo earned her law degree from Northeastern University School of Law and brings more than 20 years of experience as a litigator to the Law School. She served as general counsel at the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank and college network, as well as general counsel for the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.
Bravo made the transition from the courtroom to nonprofits later in her career. “I wanted to be more deeply involved in work that dealt with combating racism and helping promote people of color,” she said.
That desire led her to co-founding Cumbe: Center for African and Diaspora Dance, a dance and drumming studio and performance space in Brooklyn, in 2011, and launching Pathways to Apprenticeship, a nonprofit workforce development agency that assists low-income people and the formerly incarcerated to access apprenticeship opportunities in the union construction industry, in 2016.
“I love working with young people and students,” said Bravo. “My goals for the Center—which I share with Zenande—are to be a resource for students that combats oppression and to be connected to outside organizations and law firms who are doing important work like this.”
A Springboard to Success
As the spring semester builds momentum, both Booi and Bravo expressed their eagerness to solidify their collaborative process with the rest of the Fordham Law community.
“I’m most excited to build partnerships and create an identity for the Center that is long lasting and has a great impact within Fordham Law and outside it—in the city, state, and abroad,” said Booi.
“People are really thinking about issues regarding race and thinking about what they can do themselves [to combat racism], which is really exciting to be a part of,” said Bravo.
Both Booi and Bravo have already made a difference in helping organize, promote, and fund Center events, including the Feb. 1 talk with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and creator of “The 1619 Project” Nikole Hannah-Jones co-sponsored by the Center. They have also been active in planning upcoming book talks with Professor Paul Gowder of Northwestern Law School, author of The Rule of Law in the United States: An Unfinished Project of Black Liberation (Hart, 2021), and with Professor Rafael Pardo of Emory Law School, who is completing a book on the role race and slavery played in the development of bankruptcy law. With the increased staff, the Center is looking forward to expanding the work it does with its student fellows and to taking on additional projects that directly impact communities.
