At CUNY Law, transformative legal education happens at the intersection of doctrine, lived experience, and community-rooted policy work. In Professor Ally Coll’s Public Institutions course, that means engaging directly with the architects of groundbreaking legislation and understanding how laws impact real people and communities.
Last semester, those students had an opportunity to hear from the justice-oriented attorneys and advocates who hatched New York’s Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act (MRTA): CUNY Law alum Chris Alexander ’19, former Executive Director of the Office of Cannabis Management, Damian Fagon, former Chief Equity Officer and current Director of The Bronx Cannabis Hub, and Eli Northrup, Attorney for the Bronx Defenders Criminal Defense Practice and former Director of the Bronx Cannabis Hub.
They walked students step-by-step through the drafting and implementation process to share how racial justice advocacy meets real-world legislative work. This model of learning, sharing the real experiences of practitioners who are working to create systemic change, is an example of CUNY Law’s approach to legal education beyond theory and what can be learned on the page and into the lessons learned from practicing movement lawyering. You can’t ask a textbook question, but students at CUNY Law repeatedly have opportunities like these to learn how to advocate for communities from the people who have turned purpose into law.
Professor Ally Coll welcomes Chris Alexander ’19, former Executive Director of the Office of Cannabis Management, Damian Fagon, former Chief Equity Officer and current Director of The Bronx Cannabis Hub, and Eli Northrup, Attorney for the Bronx Defenders Criminal Defense Practice
Legalization vs Justice
The panel began with a critical distinction: cannabis legalization and cannabis justice are not the same thing. While legalization simply makes cannabis legal, cannabis justice is about repairing the harm caused by decades of discriminatory enforcement. In the decade before the MRTA passed in 2021, 90% of people arrested for cannabis-related offenses in New York were Black or Brown, despite relatively equal usage across all racial groups.
Students learned how the MRTA represents a boundary-breaking approach to legal reform. It was the first law in the nation to automatically expunge criminal records for prior cannabis convictions. It prevents cannabis use from being weaponized against people in family court. Most significantly, it inverts the typical licensing approach: while other states bar people with prior convictions from the legal cannabis industry, New York moves them to the front of the line through programs like CAURD (Conditional Adult-Use Retail Dispensary). Of the roughly 200 licensed dispensaries operating in New York, 178 are equity dispensaries.
The Art and Strategy of Legal Drafting
The strategically justice-focused legislative language was critical to the successful passing and implementation of the MRTA. Chris Alexander ’19 emphasized that legal drafting is more art than science, requiring lawyers to think preemptively about how words might be twisted or misinterpreted down the road.
The MRTA’s legislative history and intent section was central to the document. It was deliberately crafted to ensure courts and agencies would implement the law as intended: to address collateral consequences to ” Communities Disproportionately Impacted” (CDI) by criminalization. For the engineers of the MRTA, this meant constructing an airtight definition of what constitutes a CDI through data, research, historic arrest records, and mapping (https://cannabis.ny.gov/communities-disproportionately-impacted).
The creation of a Chief Equity Officer position, unprecedented among states with legal cannabis, meant New York had a dedicated team determining what equity would look like in practice and what training and outreach would be needed to achieve it.
Applying Advocacy in Implementation
The panel also covered the sometimes messy reality of policy implementation that can only be learned through experience. In the six-month gap between when the MRTA passed and when a governing body was established, illegal dispensaries popped up all over the state. To determine who would receive the first licenses for legal dispensaries, Chris Alexander ’19 and Damian Fagon thoroughly researched population data and carefully considered justice-centered criteria to design the CAURD program. They used data to indicate there would be enough justice-involved applicants with business experience to meet licensing criteria, carefully documenting their methodology in case it would ever come under legal scrutiny.
This is the kind of strategic thinking that is especially valuable for students to learn from specific cases. Students were able to ask the speakers questions about how and why they made certain decisions around language and other elements to include in the legislation.
Learning from Experience
By engaging with practitioners who have done the groundbreaking work of crafting legislation that prioritizes equity and justice, students develop the skills to innovate and challenge systems that have historically excluded and harmed marginalized communities. Students at CUNY Law are able to learn directly from justice-focused practitioners how to think strategically about language, implementation, and the long road of policy change.
“In classes like Public Institutions, we spend a lot of time learning about the legislative and judicial processes that govern the policymaking process. But as conversations like this one show, understanding the political realities and thinking about them strategically is perhaps even more important to successfully enacting laws that will create real, lasting change.”
– Professor Ally Coll