Rejecting the Direct Service/Impact Litigation Binary

Wasserstein Fellow CJ Sandley, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, will discuss the traditional direct service and impact litigation frameworks applied at many nonprofit legal organizations and why rejecting those frameworks can lead to more holistic, client- and movement-centered advocacy and more meaningful and sustainable systemic change. CJ will share case examples involving Alabama prisons, El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons’ supermax facility, and ICE detention centers.

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

CJ Sandley (he/they) is a Senior Staff Attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), where he focuses on anti-carceral and racial injustice litigation. Before joining the CCR, CJ was a Senior Staff Attorney at the Southern Poverty Law Center. CJ’s work has included complex litigation challenging conditions of confinement and forced labor in state and federal prisons and immigration detention centers, efforts to increase immigration habeas representation in the Deep South, and federal policy advocacy to abolish solitary confinement. CJ also sits on the board of directors of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture. CJ completed a federal judicial clerkship in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Georgia. He is a graduate of Case Western Reserve University School of Law and Auburn University.  He is based in Birmingham, Alabama.

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.