Organizing for Abolition

You are invited to join Derecka Purnell, an acclaimed author, human rights lawyer, and community organizer, in conversation with Lincoln Alexander Law's Joshua Sealy-Harrington and Sima Atri, Co-Founder of the Community Justice Collective.
 

Our Speakers

Derecka Purnell is a human rights lawyer, scholar and author of Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom. Purnell received her JD from Harvard Law School, and has lectured, studied, and strategized around social movements across the United States, the Netherlands, Belgium, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and Australia. She is currently a Scholar-in-Residence at Columbia Law School.

Sima Atri is a lawyer, organizer and co-founder of the Community Justice Collective. Sima graduated from Harvard Law School in 2015 and moved back to her hometown of Toronto in 2019. She has experience working in Toronto, Boston, New Orleans and St. Louis alongside movements fighting evictions, gentrification, worker exploitation, unjust immigration systems, and state violence by police and the broader criminal legal system.

Joshua Sealy-Harrington is a passionate teacher, scholar, advocate and Board member of the Community Justice Collective. He is an Assistant Professor at the Lincoln Alexander School of Law; his current research explores the ways in which law mediates racial hierarchy, with a particular focus on how criminal and constitutional law subordinate Black and Indigenous peoples.