FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 16, 2020
CUNY Law Professor and Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility Clinic (CLEAR) Founding Director Ramzi Kassem has been named one of 12 Freedom Scholars by the Marguerite Casey Foundation and Group Health Foundation. The accompanying $250,000 grant will support his work as one of the nation’s boldest scholars at the forefront of movements for social justice.
Professor Kassem notes: “My driving ambition is for scholarship that remains rooted in and true to the lived experience and transformative vision of the clients, communities, and movements that have worked with me. Unmoored from the accountability that accompanies a principled praxis, legal scholarship all too often serves and perpetuates prevailing power structures.”
Professor Kassem’s writing, teaching, and clinical legal practice all aim to contest the expressions and excesses of the sprawling U.S. security state, both domestically and abroad. With his students at CUNY School of Law, Professor Kassem has brought landmark civil rights litigation, including a challenge to the federal government’s abuse of watchlists in Tanzin v. Tanvir, which he will argue before the Supreme Court of the United States on October 6, and Raza v. City of New York, where he helped negotiate an historic settlement restricting surveillance of constitutionally protected religious and political activity.
“Ramzi’s work – scholarship, lawyering, activism, and scholarship in action — derives from and is in service of his work with clients and community organizations and is generated and supported by his work with students in CLEAR and CUNY Law’s Immigrant and Non-Citizens Rights Clinic. It is bold, paradigm-shifting, and fearless.,” states Dean Mary Lu Bilek.
The $3 million Freedom Scholars program is a commitment to scholarship that is rooted in and supports movements led by Black and Indigenous people, migrants, queer and poor people, and People of Color. The awards support scholars who are shifting the balance of power to families and communities that have been historically excluded from the resources and benefits of society. The Freedom Scholars are at the forefront of abolitionist, Black, feminist, queer, radical, and anti-colonialist studies and critical fields of research shifting the balance of power to families and communities that are systematically oppressed or marginalized.