UPDATE - RECORDING AVAILABLE: Watch the recording of this program here! Password is (includes exclamation mark):
L4tP2020!(NOTE: This recording is only meant to be accessed by convention registrants and NLG members. Please do not circulate publicly.)
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Movements are under attack. Subpoenas for grand jury testimony, legal observer work product, and Guild training materials are threats to our safety and protest legal support infrastructure. Come learn from activists and practitioners facing off against these challenges and tips on how you can best resist these risks and support mass defense organizing in your community. We will also discuss best practices for digital security around collecting LO work product and hear from resistance fighters who have been at the forefront of this fight for decades.
Sponsor: NLG Mass Defense Committee
Speakers:
Nathan Sheard (nash) leads EFF's grassroots, student, and community organizing efforts. As the lead coordinator of the
Electronic Frontier Alliance, nash works to support the Alliance's member organizations in educating their neighbors on digital-privacy best practices, and advocating for privacy and innovation protecting policy and legislation. nash's work is informed by lived experience with aggressive and militarized policing in the United States, Honduras, and Palestine, including racial profiling, the effects of biased broken windows policing tactics, and police brutality. nash has worked extensively to help mitigate the damage of harmful interactions with law enforcement online and in over-policed communities. Before joining EFF, as co-founder of
Black Movement Law Project and a member of
Mutant Legal, nash spent close to a decade training communities in crisis on how to document police conduct, exercise their legal rights, counteract state repression and actively participate in their own legal defense.
José E. López has written and spoken extensively on the political and social reality of Puerto Ricans in the United States while serving as Executive Director of The Puerto Rican Cultural Center Juan Antonio Corretjer in Chicago, which he co-founded in 1973; presently he is an adjunct instructor at Columbia College and the University of Illinois at Chicago. In his role as educator/activist, he has been invited to speak at over 50 colleges and universities in the United States, Mexico, Canada, and Puerto Rico as well as in international forums such as the United Nations Decolonization Committee. For over 50 years, he has been a leading member of the Puerto Rican independence movement and is also the editor of “Puerto Rican Nationalism: A Reader.” Presently, he is active in developing new/praxis/theory in community and social empowerment, particularly in the areas of educational reform through the Community as a Campus Initiative, and addressing health inequities through the building of a holistic community of wellness in Chicago’s Greater Humboldt Park communities. He has served on various Boards including Bethany/Advocate Fund Board, the Chicago Public Schools Latino Advisory Committee, The National Museum of Puerto Rico Arts and Culture, and The Puerto Rican Agenda. He is an important voice for policy and legislative reform working closely with many Latino elected officials at the city, county, state and federal levels. Over the years he has received many recognitions, including the Cook County Board of Commissioners 2009 Hispanic Heritage Award, the 2010 Health Award from Health and Medicine Policy Research Group, and the Chicago Cultural Alliance: 2014 Outstanding Community Leader Award.
Carol Sobel is a civil rights lawyer and advocate who has repeatedly sued the City of Los Angeles for violating the rights or protestors and the unhoused population. Ms. Sobel spent 20 years working at the ACLU Foundation of Southern California until she left in 1997 to start her own practice. After the 1992 Rodney King uprising in LA, she was one of the lawyers who worked on revising the LAPD's Crowd Control and Use of Force policies. She served as lead co-counsel in several cases challenging police practices at the DNC 2000 in Los Angeles. She also served as class co- counsel in Multi-Ethnic Worker Immigration Network ("MIWON") v. City of Los Angeles, resulting from the LAPD's assault on nearly 5,000 people involved in a peaceful immigration rights rally on May Day 2007. She also served as class co-counsel in Aichele v. City of Los Angeles in 2011, brought on behalf of 300 individuals arrested for camping on City Hall lawn as part of Occupy Los Angeles, and Chua v. City of Los Angeles, on behalf of a large group of protestors arrested by the Los Angeles in the demonstrations that followed the decision of the Ferguson grand jury not to indict the officer who shot and killed Michael Brown. Currently, Ms. Sobel is co-counsel in Black Lives Matter Los Angeles v. City of Los Angeles, a class action filed in federal court on behalf of more than 4,000 persons arrested in the City in protests against the killing of George Floyd and other persons of color by law enforcement around the country, as well as individuals subjected to use of force in the form of "rubber bullets" and batons deployed against the Floyd protestors. She co-chaired the National Lawyers Guild's Mass Defense Committee for 10 years and is a board member of the National Police Accountability Project. She is currently an adjunct professor at Loyola Law School where she teaches a civil right practicum.
Maggie Ellinger-Locke (she/hers) is a staff attorney at Greenpeace USA where she supports as in-house counsel, advises climate justice activists, and works on democracy issues including voting rights and anti-protest legislation. She is very active with the Guild and has held several positions within NLG over the years. She is particularly committed to mass defense and helped to lead the Guild's response through several movement moments, including the Ferguson Uprising, the Trump inauguration (J20), and the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. She is originally from St. Louis and currently lives in the Washington, DC area.
