Fordham Law’s Center on Race, Law, and Justice, in collaboration with Defying Legal Gravity, hosted the inaugural Youth Legal Empowerment Conference, a first of its kind event for high school students in the New York City area that brought together youth leaders, community members, and advocates “to explore practical strategies for community-built justice.”
Students learned about the law through peer-led panels and also participated in workshops that taught them real world legal skills, how to review lease agreements and how to safeguard their federal education law rights.
“The inaugural Youth Legal Empowerment Conference illustrated how important it is to recognise, trust, and nurture the agency, energy and creativity of young people,” said Zenande Booi, executive director of the Center on Race Law and Justice. “The law and legal literacy is an important tool to ensure the protection of our rights and communities that must be available to everyone—regardless of race, class or social status.”
Defying Legal Gravity (DLG), is a nonprofit organization that allows underserved high school students across New York City to learn the foundations of a first-year law school curriculum through a series of classes completed over the course of the academic year.
DLG fellows hosted themed workshops on a range of legal topics. During the contracts and negotiations workshop, participants were asked to review two lease agreements and determine which had the best conditions for tenants. And during the education law workshop, participants worked in groups to draw magazine covers that explored education-related topics like student disability rights, Title I financial assistance, and how education policy impacts undocumented students.
“The purpose of this event is to gather today and see what legal empowerment looks like in real time when we transfer that power to the youth,” said Craig Shepherd ’19, who co-founded DLG along with fellow Fordham Law alumni Diana Imbert-Hodges ’19.
Other conference events included a legal empowerment panel featuring advocacy organizations The Center for Urban Pedagogy and Youth Represent, as well as a keynote address by poet, musician, and cultural worker, Aja Monet. A plenary discussion moderated by Jhody Polk, a formerly incarcerated jailhouse lawyer and founder of the Jailhouse Lawyers Initiative, featured a panel of previous DLG fellows who discussed how the law shaped their lives growing up and how it impacts their lives today.
“I believe in personal and collective power where we are legally empowered to know, use, and shape the law,” said Polk. “I encourage everyone…to really think about how the law can be your own personal tool, and how we can criticize it, but also use it as an instrument to ensure that we have the best quality of life possible.”
“I think this is a really interesting time for us to be thinking about putting power into the hands of youth,” said Imbert-Hodges. “This is really about ensuring that [young people]have the tools that they need to be able to imagine the better world that they know is coming, and that they know that they are building.”