Over the course of orientation week, the incoming J.D. and LL.M. students – hailing from all 50 U.S. states and 76 different countries – toured campus and city, were introduced to classroom norms and Law Center resources and connected with their new classmates.
Fransharon Jackson has done what’s been asked of her since she was sentenced in 1998 to life in prison.
The crisis of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy stems from many causes and failures. On April 9, Georgetown University Law Center and Georgetown University’s Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life sponsored a timely and much-needed dialogue with survivors, clergy, attorneys for the Catholic Church, attorneys for survivors, canon law and civil law experts, media, social workers and more.
The rate of female incarceration has jumped nearly 1,300 percent in the past four decades, from fewer than 8,000 women in 1970, mostly in jails, to about 110,000 in 2014. But, as retired federal Judge Nancy Gertner pointed out, “The last I heard, there is not a women’s crime wave that is sweeping the country.”
“Just as our recent wars have mostly been against those who are poor, those who can easily be demonized and viewed as ‘other’ by the average American — so too, our criminal law has tended to be enforced primarily and disproportionately against the poor and people of color,” said Professor Rosa Brooks, who was installed as Georgetown Law’s inaugural Scott K. Ginsburg Professor of Law and Policy on March 20.
Section 3 first year students Natalie Tverdynin (L'21), Jeremy Penn (L’21) and Akshay Nelakurti (L’21) had some unexpected free time on the morning of March 21. So the three friends went to hear oral arguments of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit — with Chief Judge Merrick B. Garland (H’18), Judge Sri Srinivasan and Judge A. Raymond Randolph.
When Cyrus R. Vance (L’82) became the Manhattan District Attorney in 2009, he noticed that the numbers of men and women of color being prosecuted for crime was the same as the number being prosecuted 30 years ago, when he was an assistant DA. Vance asked himself, Why is this picture the same? Does this system of justice keep us safer? Is it fair? What can we do to change it?
In an attempt to explain to the Supreme Court that video evidence doesn’t always yield a clear outcome, the students in Georgetown Law’s Appellate Courts Immersion Clinic, working with an Arkansas civil rights law firm, turned to a sports analogy…
In the spring of 2018, Professor Shon Hopwood was driving through Tennessee to visit a client when the president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM) — a nonprofit working towards criminal justice reform — asked him to reach out to a man named Matthew Charles.
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.
Tiauna Mathieu (L’19) was inspired to become a lawyer, she says, in a sixth grade law and government class where half of the class served as the prosecution and half served as the defense.
