Increasingly\, public interest law require s multi-pronged advocacy strategies\, inside and outside the courts. Join O PIA for a discussion with Wasserstein Fellow Scott Levy on how to pair po licy advocacy\, impact litigation\, community organizing\, data and researc h\, and communications with direct client representation to effect meaningf ul change. Scott will discuss his many years working in a public defenders office\, the challenges of engaging in broad policy work while still repres enting clients in court\, and how lawyers need to develop a set of interdis ciplinary tools to be effective advocates and coalition partners.
Lun ch provided. Please RSVP below! Open to the HLS community.
If you or an event participant requires disability-related accommodations\, please co ntact 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 organiz ation committed to ending mass incarceration and transforming the immigrati on system\, where he works on criminal justice and immigration policy refor m 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 successf ul campaign to obtain executive clemency for people serving disproportionat e federal sentences. Prior to FWD.us\, Scott worked for 14 years as an atto rney at the Bronx Defenders\, a holistic public defender office in the Sout h Bronx\, where he built and managed the office’s public policy practice. W hile at the Bronx Defenders\, Scott was deeply involved in a number of crim inal legal system reform efforts in New York\, including the movement to re write New York’s bail and discovery laws\, a successful campaign to elimina te driver’s license suspensions for unpaid traffic tickets\, and the effort to pass Clean Slate legislation to seal criminal conviction records. He al so 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 Pri nceton 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 P rojects Editor for the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review. He clerked for the Honorable Nancy Gertner in the Federal District Court of Ma ssachusetts before joining The Bronx Defenders.
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