It’s a Sin to Kill a Mockingbird: The Need for Idealism in the Legal Profession

“[T]he first thing I lost in law school was the reason that I came.” This prescient quote by an unnamed law student defines, in a single sentence, our growing problem in training lawyers. From the moment he or she steps foot in a law school classroom, the future lawyer feels a strong pull to pursue a career that has nothing to do with justice. The law school experience will discourage the future lawyer from pursuing a career advocating for those in society who most need a voice. Once graduated, the young lawyer will enter a world where he or she is rewarded for billing the most hours at the highest rate, rather than for serving those with the least access to justice. As a result, most lawyers will experience a sense of purposelessness in their careers, and most low-income Americans will not have access to a lawyer when important interests are at stake

Postfeminist stylistics, work femininities and coaching: a multimodal study of a website

The aim of this paper is to examine representations of work femininities on a British website offering coaching specifically aimed at women. It builds on and contributes to studies of postfeminist representations but with a specific focus on work femininities and coaching webpages. Although studies on postfeminist representation have analysed the way young women’s, embodied and sexualised femininities are depicted across a wide variety of mainstream media, there has not been a study that focuses on the representation of work femininities on coaching websites. My approach matter because feminist authors critique popular psychology and link it to postfeminism and neoliberalism but as yet studies have focused on self-help books and magazines and not new media. Furthermore, coaching websites are an important medium for circulating postfeminist work femininities and psychological advice, produced through the digital labour of women entrepreneurs. Through my analysis of one website, influenced by feminist social semiotic multimodality literature, the paper contributes to postfeminist theory and organisation studies by explaining how ‘postfeminist stylistics’ reproduce postfeminist tropes and depictions of relational and individualised entrepreneurial femininities visually and textually (Lewis, 2014)

A Young Girl Reading: Martha’s Quest through Literature and Realism in Martha Quest

This paper examines the young heroine’s ambivalent relationship with books in Doris Lessing’s coming-of-age novel Martha Quest. Martha, a young British girl growing up in the British colony of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in the wake of World War II, is a voracious young reader who reads extensively in order to make sense of the world in which she is living. Sometimes the books she reads lead her to think critically and challenge the canonical authorities and patriarchal society; however, at times her reading experience is also unsettling and frustrating because the books she reads are mostly produced within a biased system she intends to go beyond. The paper analyzes how Martha relies on books to reshape her national identity and personal life, and how she deals with the discrepancy between the world represented in books and reality in terms of Benedict Anderson’s concept of an ‘imagined community’. Furthermore, this paper also discusses how Martha’s portrait as a bewildered reader of realist literature mirrors Lessing’s own ambiguous relationship with her realist narratives

Working in the Public Interest Law Conference

The two-day conference included a variety of panel discussions and roundtables on such topics as: civil liberties; race and the criminal justice system; decriminalizing mental illness; funding public defender systems; the media\u27s role in the law; immigration; lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered youth in state sponsored institutions; environmental justice; and women\u27s reproductive rights

Keynote Speaker

Keynote address presented by president and founder of Gideon’s Promise and director of the honors program in criminal justice at Atlanta’s John Marshall Law School, lecturer on law at Harvard Law School, 2014 MacArthur Foundation fellow and genius grant recipient, and 2013 Public Interest Scholar in Residence at Touro Law School