Embracing Messiness: Embedding Policy Advocacy within a Direct Representation Practice

Increasingly, public interest law requires multi-pronged advocacy strategies, inside and outside the courts. Join OPIA for a discussion with Wasserstein Fellow Scott Levy on how to pair policy advocacy, impact litigation, community organizing, data and research, and communications with direct client representation to effect meaningful change. Scott will discuss his many years working in a public defenders office, the challenges of engaging in broad policy work while still representing clients in court, and how lawyers need to develop a set of interdisciplinary tools to be effective advocates and coalition partners.

Lunch provided. Please RSVP below! Open to the HLS community.

If you or an event participant requires disability-related accommodations, please contact HLS Accessibility Services at accessibility@law.harvard.edu two weeks in advance of the event.

Scott Levy is Chief Policy Counsel at FWD.us, a bipartisan organization committed to ending mass incarceration and transforming the immigration system, where he works on criminal justice and immigration policy reform efforts at the state and national level. He currently leads FWD’s work on protecting equal access to education for all children and the intersection of criminal justice and immigration policy, and previously led a successful campaign to obtain executive clemency for people serving disproportionate federal sentences. Prior to FWD.us, Scott worked for 14 years as an attorney at the Bronx Defenders, a holistic public defender office in the South Bronx, where he built and managed the office’s public policy practice. While at the Bronx Defenders, Scott was deeply involved in a number of criminal legal system reform efforts in New York, including the movement to rewrite New York’s bail and discovery laws, a successful campaign to eliminate driver’s license suspensions for unpaid traffic tickets, and the effort to pass Clean Slate legislation to seal criminal conviction records. He also managed the Marijuana Arrest Project and was lead counsel in Trowbridge v. DiFiore, a federal civil rights case challenging delays in misdemeanor cases in Bronx Criminal Court. Scott graduated magna cum laude from the Princeton School of International and Public Affairs in 2002 and received his J.D. cum laude in 2007 from Harvard Law School, where he was the Special Projects Editor for the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review. He clerked for the Honorable Nancy Gertner in the Federal District Court of Massachusetts before joining The Bronx Defenders.