NAPD 2024 Women's Virtual Conference

This session will highlight how African American women law professors are leveraging their scholarship and teaching to drive social and legal reform, with a particular focus on criminal justice and public policy. Panelists will discuss how their research influences public policy and how their advocacy efforts bridge the gap between academic work and on-the-ground public defense. They describe how they strive to mentor the next generation of law students toward public interest and social justice careers. Attendees will better understand how these trailblazing professors are shaping legal change inside and outside the classroom to advance equity and justice.

Disability justice represents a powerful paradigm shift in how we approach issues of accessibility and social change. Rather than viewing disability through a narrow, medical lens that seeks to "fix" or "normalize" bodies, disability justice activists are championing a more expansive, intersectional understanding of disability as a fundamental part of the human experience. They recognize that ableism, the systemic discrimination against disabled people, is deeply intertwined with other systems of oppression like racism, sexism, and classism. By centering the diverse lived experiences of disabled people across race, gender, class, and other identity lines, disability justice challenges us to grapple with the realities of bodily difference and limitations in all their complexity. This means moving beyond one-size-fits-all approaches to accessibility and instead cultivating mixed-ability organizing spaces and communities that foster genuine solidarity.