S. Theater of Change: Reimagining and Enacting Justice

1 credit earned over the span of 10 days over the following period:

Fri-Sun (2/16-2/18): Friday 2-5, Saturday 11-5 Sunday 11-3 Full Group Course Sessions (in class instructional time)
Monday - Sunday (2/19-2/25) : Project Group Working Time (project groups arrange to meet with facilitators to complete their presentations at mutually convenient times).
Monday Evening (2/26 5-9): Final Shareback

This experiential learning seminar and practicum will enable participants to blend artistry, law, policy, and community engagement, and in this way to produce narratives with powerful impact in policy spaces where change can happen. The course will equip law students to use legal knowledge and skills to change the public narrative about the criminal justice system and to collaborate with artists and community activists to make change happen in venues where laws are made and power is exercised. In the process the participants will work with community members to amplify the power of their stories through artistry informed by legal and policy research. With criminal justice, immigration detention, and housing justice as the policy focal points, the workshop will enable participants to craft and enact compelling stories about justice and injustice in “theaters of change,” which include both legal spaces such as the courtroom, the agency, and the legislature, and other spaces for building effective coalitions and shifting hearts and minds of thought leaders and policy makers, such as the conference, the town hall, and the public square.

Using an innovative, experiential methodology, the course will build crucial lawyering skills for participating law students, including:

● Learning how to translate legal material (including case law, legislation, and information about the operations of the legal and policy landscape) to non-lawyer collaborators and clients;
● Understanding and exploring strategies to narrow the gap between law on the books and law in practice, as well as the gap between needs and aspirations of directly affected communities and the laws currently in place to address those needs and aspirations
● Gaining insight into how legal venues and processes (including courts, legislatures, and administrative agencies) fits into the broader context of efforts to advance change
● Practicing and tailoring forms of communication and storytelling to different contexts
● Improving the capacity to communicate with people from different disciplines and backgrounds who have to work together to achieve a shared goal
● Cultivate practices that enable empathy and perspective taking, and thus reduce the expression of bias
● Conducting effective interviews of clients, experts, and potential collaborators
● Developing a more in depth understanding of the various roles that lawyers may play in working with organizations and communities
● Develop strategic capacity to help non-legal actors tailor their messages and venues to account for the relevant legal and political contexts

The course and practicum will be offered to a strategically selected group of law students, professional artists, and directly affected activists on the front lines of change work in the realm of criminal justice. It will create a space in which its participants can cross-train; to learn from each others’ disciplines and methodologies, and build collaborative capacity to advance justice. Students will be selected for participation through an application process available at this link: https://forms.gle/eNPZB4iLFviwPUvCA. Applications will be considered on a rolling basis, starting at the close of preregistration on November 13.

If you have religious observances that would prevent you from being present for one of the scheduled sessions, the instructors will make arrangements to accommodate those religious observances so that you are able to fully participate in the Theater of Change.

The course grows out of a collaboration between the Broadway Advocacy Coalition (BAC) and the Center for Institutional and Social Change at Columbia Law School. BAC is an arts based organization dedicated to bridging the worlds of arts, justice and education for the purpose of building new collaborative methods for reducing racism and mass incarceration.

Students with questions should contact Professor Susan Sturm, [email protected] or Leia Squillace, [email protected].