FACULTY ADDRESS: Professor Jeena Shah
Professor Shah was elected by the graduating Class of 2022 to receive the Outstanding Faculty Award and deliver the Faculty Address. These are her words.
Jeena Shah is an Associate Professor at the CUNY School of Law. Prior to joining CUNY’s faculty, Jeena was a Visiting Assistant Clinical Professor at Rutgers Law School, where she directed the International Human Rights Clinic and co-taught in the Constitutional Rights Clinic.
In that role, she supervised students in litigation and advocacy in support of grassroots groups fighting for racial and economic justice, the rights of immigrant and LGBTQ communities, and veterans’ care. For her work with the clinics, the Rutgers Law chapter of the National Lawyers Guild awarded her with the Arthur Kinoy Award.
Before entering academia, Jeena was an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR). In that capacity, she litigated Al Shimari v. CACI and Sexual Minorities Uganda v. Scott Lively under the Alien Tort Statute, provided legal and advocacy support to people’s movements across the U.S. and the globe, and designed and conducted training on movement lawyering.
Prior to CCR, Jeena served as an international human rights attorney with community-based law offices in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and Gujarat, India. In Haiti, with the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux, she supported local lawyers and organizers fighting unlawful evictions of communities displaced by the 2010 earthquake and victims of the ex-dictator Duvalier’s crimes against humanity, and observed the country’s national elections. In India, with Navsarjan, Jeena supported local lawyers and organizers representing Dalit victims of hate crimes and other forms of caste-based discrimination.
Jeena also practiced at Shearman & Sterling LLP, where she litigated complex commercial and civil rights matters.
Jeena has appeared on various media outlets, including Democracy Now! and Al Jazeera, to discuss human rights issues. In 2017, she helped found and direct the Movement Lawyering Boot Camp. Jeena graduated from NYU School of Law in 2007 and received her B.A. summa cum laude in Political Science and French from Drew University in 2004.
Remarks
What an honor to be recognized by this class.
This class who while undergoing rigorous training to become exceptional lawyers
Organized mutual aid funds to support each other and our communities when the pandemic hit
This class who was on the front lines protesting for Black Lives and abolitionist futures
Who even faced police brutality and arrests while legal observing those protests (and turned around and sued the NYPD)
This class who publicly resolved to stand with our Palestinian comrades fighting for their homeland
Who organized scholarships and protested bar admission practices to ensure those who have faced the brunt of state violence – those impacted by policing and incarceration – would fill the ranks of our profession.
This class who struggled together and with each other striving for COVID policies to make our school a place where disability justice has meaning
And who stood up to anti-Blackness when the fabric of our own school community was tearing apart
It is indeed an honor to be recognized by this class.
***
As we see in the impending Supreme Court decision that may take away the very core of what it means to exercise self-determination, the times we are living in today shows that the law alone will not guarantee our peoples’ freedom.
But You, as a collective, have shown us all here at this law school, that you were not simply undergoing legal training. You were learning to synthesize that training with being deeply in community with those harmed by the law. YOU will be the lawyers we need today.
***
The last time I saw many of you – in person – was in our last LEDP class, where we read aloud together a poem by Martin Espada called “Imagine the Angels of Bread”
[I want to share some excerpts of the poem here. To help you follow along, each line of Espada’s poem that I’m reading here begins with “this is the year.” I’ll be interjecting with messages of my own to the Class of 2022]
“This is the year that squatters EVICT LANDLORDS
Class of 2022, You’ll be there – supporting tenant organizing, defending them in housing court, and building community land trusts.
“this is the year
that shawled refugees DEPORT JUDGES,
Class of 2022, You’ll be there – freeing people from detention centers and removal proceedings, and tearing down border walls
“this is the year that police revolvers, stove-hot, blister the fingers of raging cops,
Class of 2022, You’ll be there – defending people in precincts and criminal courthouses, and And building programs for violence interruption and transformative justice
“this is the year that the hands pulling tomatoes from the vine
uproot the deed to the earth that sprouts the vine,
Class of 2022, You’ll be there – supporting workers on farms and day laborer centers, at picket lines, and building worker-owned cooperatives
“this is the year that the eyes
stinging from the poison that purifies toilets awaken at last to the sight
of a rooster-loud hillside, pilgrimage of immigrant birth;”
Class of 2022, You’ll be there – ensuring labor protections for domestic workers and reuniting families across borders
“this is the year that cockroaches become extinct, that no doctor finds a roach embedded
in the ear of an infant;
this is the year that the food stamps of adolescent mothers
are auctioned like gold doubloons, “
Class of 2022, You’ll be there – fighting for a safe environment, healthcare, and food for all, at administrative hearings, city planning meetings, and the halls of Congress
“If the abolition of slave-manacles
began as a vision of hands without manacles,
then this is the year…”
***
We read this poem together on the eve of 2020, which brought on one the largest uprisings in U.S. history. I read this to you again now because I know this is again the year…
I know this because this is the year
you all will be out there as lawyers,
using your legal skills side by side with your communities tearing down institutions of destruction
and building something beautiful.
Watch
