Yale’s Rebellious Lawyering Conference explores non-conventional law jobs
What does a non-conventional law job look like? In 1L (and maybe even after) it can be difficult to see a path for yourself beyond Bay Street. The search for an alternate legal path was what motivated us to attend the 26th Annual Rebellious Lawyering Conference at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.
The conference, which refers to itself as RebLaw, “seeks to build a community of law students, practitioners, and activists seeking to work in the service of social change movements and to challenge hierarchies of race, wealth, gender, and expertise within legal practice and education”. RebLaw is entirely student-run and the largest public interest conference of its kind in the United States.
We expected the conference to introduce us to like-minded law students from across the US and Canada, as well as to network with and learn from practicing public interest lawyers. We were also excited to visit the Yale campus and learn more about studying law at an Ivy League school.
The conference offers the helpful service of providing accommodation with a Yale Law student for visiting attendees, resulting in us being paired with a 1L who kindly let us sleep on her couch. Although we hoped to forge a more meaningful connection with our host, we found that this was not the result—maybe it was because we were from Canada! Regardless, offering accommodation for visiting attendees, most of whom are students on a limited budget, is certainly an incentive to attend.
Upon arrival, we were given a program with a schedule of the weekend’s panels and events. Many of them sounded exciting: Climate, Immigration, and Criminal Justice; Systemic Violence, Rights Abuses, and Animal Agriculture; and We Don’t Need Police in Reproductive Justice, to name a few. There were also two keynote speakers: Judge Carlton W. Reeves, appointed to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi by President Obama, and Kerry Ellington, a freedom fighter, grassroots community organizer, and radical educator.
The conference was well-staffed with student volunteers from Yale Law School, and many of the attendees were also from Yale. We also met students from Vassar, NYU, Colorado, and McGill, to name a few.
We were most inspired by the keynote from Judge Reeves, who spoke of the importance of empathy in the law and his own experience as an African American law student and lawyer. His keynote, moderated by a Yale Law professor, was serious yet generated a few laughs. It was inspiring to see the kindness with which Judge Reeves practices law, writing judgments that demonstrate his ability to empathize with claimants who come from different backgrounds, such as with the issues of same-sex marriage or abortion. Judge Reeves also spoke on the importance of seeing the humanity of every individual when he discussed how any judge who finds it easy to sentence someone to prison should take a step back.
The panels, while interesting and relating to topics that may not often find their way into the law school classroom, were not as relevant to Canadian law as we had hoped. The conference made it clear to us that some of the largest issues facing the American legal system are in fact quite different from some of the most pressing issues in Canadian law. For example, panels on the School-to-Prison pipeline, or Abolishing Immigrant Detention, are either non-existent in Canada or occur at a much smaller scale than in the U.S. Panels that we thought sounded like they would be relevant, like Systemic Violence, Rights Abuses, and Animal Agriculture, were also surprising in their specificity to the American system. We came armed with our notebooks, but each left with only half a page.
On Saturday, we attended a breakout session, which was in the format of a small group lunchtime discussion that aimed to “provide a space for people to discuss how more narrow concerns inform and challenge their approach to social justice and lawyering.” These sessions ranged in topic from Free Speech to Climate Justice to National Security to Queer Liberation, and attendees could choose any one of the topics listed to attend. The discussions were moderated by Yale law students.
While we expected this to be a productive time to discuss pressing issues with our fellow attendees, we found that the way the discussion was moderated did not encourage attendees to challenge their existing opinions or approaches to rebellious lawyering. Instead, people whose opinions conflicted with the majority were viewed as diverting the conversation.
For example, we found the discussion supported the view that being less visibly queer invalidated one’s personal queer identity and ability to speak on the topic. Those in the room who did not identify as queer were not encouraged to speak or ask questions, and terms such as “Queer Liberation” were not explained. The discussion seemed uninterested in encouraging ally-ship, which is counterintuitive to the very concept of rebellious lawyering.
If anything, this conference illuminated to us the need for a Canadian equivalent, a student conference that applies the concept of rebellious lawyering to Canadian legal issues (of which there are many!) While we would encourage our Canadian law student peers to consider attending the RebLaw conference, we would also welcome any students interested in developing a Canadian RebLaw to reach out.
