Perhaps no guest of a Georgetown Law student organization was ever quite so at ease speaking to Georgetown Law students as David Cole, the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Legal Director.
Almost half of all African American men have been arrested by age 23. One in three have a felony conviction. More than 500,000 are currently incarcerated. Professor Paul Butler knows this, because as a former federal prosecutor, it was his job to lock up black men. But Butler, a black man, is well aware that his own resume (which also includes Georgetown Law professor and a J.D. from Harvard) hasn’t insulated him from police bias.
When James Forman Jr., a former Georgetown Law and current Yale Law faculty member, was working as a public defender in Washington, D.C., in the 1990s, he represented a 15-year-old client named Brandon who had pled guilty to gun and marijuana possession. Forman was requesting probation; the prosecutor wanted Brandon sent to Oak Hill, D.C.’s now-notorious juvenile facility. The judge chose Oak Hill — to Forman’s fury. The same racial injustice that motivated him to become a public defender, he realized, was being used to lock his client away.
With latest election results, at least 104 of 138 elected and appointed officials accused of sexual misconduct will be out of office, new Georgetown Law research finds.
For Election Day 2018, we talked to the experts on the work that’s being done at Georgetown Law with respect to voting rights, election integrity, campaign finance and more. Professor Aderson François of Georgetown Law’s Voting Rights Institute;…
It was the latest roll call for 18 Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department officers and civilian personnel participating in a pioneering Georgetown Law-MPD joint fellowship program — and the first for 26 more set to walk the new beat.
Students and graduate fellows at Georgetown Law's Appellate Courts Immersion Clinic, directed by Professor Brian Wolfman, have secured a victory for a Memphis man who spent 17 years in prison — more than seven years greater than the maximum statutory sentence — for unlawful possession of ammunition.
“The last few weeks have been hard — as individuals, as a community, and as a country…” said Emily Clarke (L’20), president of the Women’s Legal Alliance at Georgetown Law. “We have been forced to grapple with questions of power, gender, credibility and integrity. Some of us have dealt with this in our classes. Watching the [Supreme Court nomination] hearings and discussing their impact. Many of us have huddled with our friends and tried to attach the right words to how we are feeling. But even more of us have sat alone, wondering how this could be happening and where we are supposed to go from here.”
When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1993 — and when her colleague Justice Stephen Breyer was nominated in 1994 — there was “a true bipartisan spirit in our Congress…” she said. The late Senators Ted Kennedy and Strom Thurmond, for example, had a very good working relationship, she noted. “I hope that I will live to see that spirit of collegiality restored in our legislature.”
“Last term was a term of blockbusters, most of which fizzled out,” said Professor Irv Gornstein, as he introduced Georgetown Law’s annual Supreme Court Institute press preview on September 17. “This term, by contrast, doesn’t have any blockbusters to begin with — but I think a more accurate caption for this term is the calm before the storm. We’re headed for a whole new world, and the only real question, I think, is how far we are going to go and how fast we are going to get there.”