CUNY Law Celebrates 37th Commencement

NEW YORK (April 28, 2022): On Friday, May 13, the City University of New York School of Law will celebrate the achievements of the 160 students who make up the Class of 2022. The program will feature Professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, who will deliver the commencement address and receive an honorary degree for her work advancing our understanding of the political and economic forces underlying racial inequality and the role of social movements in transforming society. The ceremony will take place at 10 a.m. at Colden Auditorium on the Queens College campus.

Professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Distinguished Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, has served as a scholar and cultural historian whose work explores why racial inequality is so devastatingly intractable while offering new visions of justice and democracy. In 2021, Professor Taylor was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Genius Fellowship, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship and is a prolific writer and author of Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership and From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. Professor Taylor was a housing activist and tenant advocate in Chicago, recognized for her work in protecting tenants from eviction and drawing the parallels between her research on the origins of segregation and the subprime lending market, as she studied the long-term relationship between the federal government and housing programs.

Every graduating class at CUNY Law elects a faculty member to receive its Outstanding Faculty Award, as well as two Student Speakers. The Class of 2022 selected Professor Jeena Shah along with students Nerdeen Mohsen Kiswani ’22, and Justine Ortiz ’22 to address the class.

At 3:00 p.m., the CUNY School of Law will hold a second celebration and confer its Juris Doctorates for its 335 graduates from the Classes of 2020 and 2021. Speakers include Professor Fareed Hayat, elected by the Class of 2021, and Professor Sofia Yakren, elected by the Class of 2020. Elisabeth R. Bernard and Hina Naveed, both graduates from the Class of 2021, will also speak.

Prepared by the Law School’s top-ranking clinical program and social justice imperatives, the new graduates will continue serving and advocating on behalf of their communities, from immigration justice to housing security and environmental justice. All three classes of graduates shall continue to catalyze transformative law in the service of human needs, as they enter the legal profession equipped with invaluable clinical experience and the expertise imparted by the Law School’s cutting-edge faculty.