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S3E06: Housing, Critical Race Theory, and Clinical Law with Prof. Norrinda Hayat
19 Plays3 years ago
Interim Co-Dean Rose Cuison-Villazor sits down with Professor of Law and Director of the Civil Justice Clinic to discuss Critical Race Theory and her work in fighting against evictions in New Jersey during the COVID-19 pandemic.
You can read about Prof. Hayat's work here.
The Power of Attorney is produced by Rutgers Law School. With two locations minutes from Philadelphia and New York City, Rutgers Law offers the prestige and reputation of a large, nationally-known university combined with a personal, small campus experience. Learn more by visiting law.rutgers.edu.
Production Manager: Margaret McCarthy
Series Producer: Nate Nakao
Editor: Nate Nakao
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Transcript
Factual History vs. Myths in K-12 Education
00:00:00
Speaker
Some of what we're talking about is really not a conversation about critical race theory at all. I don't know what you think about this, but at the K-12 level, I don't think we're talking about critical race theory. I think we're talking about just plain old history. Do we want to teach history as it is documented, right? As historians know to be true, or do we want to continue to teach myths to children?
00:00:25
Speaker
Hello everyone, this is Rose Quizan Villazor, Interim Dean at Rutgers Law School in Newark. I am joined today by my colleague, Narinda Hayak, who is a Clinical Associate Professor of Law in the Civil Justice Clinic.
Clinical Teaching and Anti-Racist Pedagogy
00:00:39
Speaker
And we will be talking today about clinical teaching, anti-racist pedagogy, as well as this new project that she and her students will be working on to address the right of tenants to be able to stay in their homes and avoid eviction during the pandemic.
00:00:54
Speaker
Narinda, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for having me, Rose. Tell me a little bit about how you got into clinical law teaching. I'd love to know first your background and how you ended up where you are today.
00:01:10
Speaker
I would say that I got into clinical law teaching after having spent about almost a decade at the Civil Rights Division in the Department of Justice in D.C. doing housing work. I was a line attorney there working on housing discrimination cases all around the country.
00:01:30
Speaker
I really loved doing that work. I didn't know much about it before I got to the department, but I really enjoyed pursuing those cases under the Fair Housing Act, which comes within the Civil Rights Act of 1968.
Housing's Role in Access to Rights
00:01:44
Speaker
I just grew to better understand just how central housing is to so many of our other rights.
00:01:52
Speaker
For instance, education is really in most areas of this country dictated by where you live. How your access to jobs is also dictated by where you live. Environmental justice, so the air we breathe, is different depending on where we live. And so, you know, I hadn't realized before joining the department just
00:02:15
Speaker
really how fundamental housing is to our right to enjoy our citizenship writ large. But after being there for some time,
00:02:26
Speaker
I grew to really understand that. And again, I should have said also policing is very different. Our interaction with the criminal justice system is very, very tied to where we live. And the largest case that I did at the department was the first to really bring criminal law and policing statutes together with our housing statutes. And that was in LA County.
00:02:52
Speaker
But I grew my family also while at the department and the travel. So as I said, you know, we pursued these cases throughout the country. My largest cases were in California, though I lived in D.C. And I just couldn't keep the travel up.
00:03:08
Speaker
with my two young children. So I was looking to continue to do this work, to grow in it, to better understand it, while also not having such a heavy travel schedule. And, you know, academia
00:03:26
Speaker
which had always been on my radar, but that having that substantive area of law that I wanted to continue to study and wanting to stay more local to D.C., an opportunity came up to teach at an institution in Washington in a housing clinic.
00:03:48
Speaker
And it just seemed perfect for me, right? Because it really was a perfect mix of what I was looking for. So I took that opportunity and haven't
Impact of Living Areas on Opportunities
00:03:58
Speaker
looked back. I mean, it's just been great to be able to study even more deeply than what I could when I was on the road and doing the active litigation just to study all of these intersections. I've been able to do that since coming to academia and have really enjoyed it and been able to,
00:04:15
Speaker
continue to grow my understanding of all the ways in which really housing should be a human right.
00:04:23
Speaker
Have you always wanted to be a law professor? Tell me what it was like growing up. You wake up one day and said, I'm definitely going to be a housing rights advocate. I'm going to teach in a law school. I did not say housing rights advocate, but I have to say that both of my parents were teachers at a point. My mom was a teacher in the Philadelphia public school system for 35 years. My dad taught also in the
00:04:51
Speaker
Philadelphia public school system for several years before he went off and had a business career, went to law school himself, and my husband was a teacher at LAUS and LAUSD before he went to law school. So this marriage of teaching and law is like all swirling all around in my family and I did
00:05:12
Speaker
pretend to teach a lot, you know, mimicking my mom and parents. When I was a young, a very young child, I pretended to teach a lot. I would say probably up until middle school, I would pretend to teach a lot every day. I don't know if I knew I would be a law professor, maybe a college professor was where I thought that might go. But, you know, it all, like, it feels very synchronous, like it was meant to be.
00:05:40
Speaker
One of the things that stood out to me when you were talking about housing and where we live impacts our, what it means to be a citizen, relationships, jobs, where we go to school. The other one is also who we end up forming romantic relationships with. And there was a Pew study that was done a few years ago that showed that the country is much more diverse.
00:06:06
Speaker
in terms of, let's say, interracial relationships. But there have also been similar studies that have shown, and as you know, much of the country remains segregated. And so there is a correlation or relationship between where we live and our exposure to people with whom we might be able to form romantic relationships with someone from the other race. Of course, as those studies have shown,
00:06:34
Speaker
Some people would also go to college and then graduate school. And so then there's additional intersections of education, race, and place. That also impacts where the types of families that we end up forming in the United States.
Integration and Resource Allocation Challenges
00:06:51
Speaker
So I just thought that was interesting that in your view, housing plays such an important role
00:06:56
Speaker
We are, as Americans, and the communities we form, the friendships we end up having, our work relationships with others. Right. That's right. I think about that often, even in deciding personally where to live, where I want my children to live, how we live, who we live around, right? I've been thinking a lot. So the point of the work that I did at the department in many respects was to further integration.
00:07:27
Speaker
I have moved back away from that and thinking that there's a class dynamic to how we think about integration and segregation. And that integration has been most beneficial for people of color at a higher socioeconomic bandwidth. It's super hard for poor people of color to integrate.
00:07:54
Speaker
They are often pushed out of communities when they attempt to integrate in ways that I am starting to believe visits trauma on those communities that's not worth it to them. Right. And so I've been also thinking that we should be working on, you know, dual tracks, which is
00:08:16
Speaker
making sure that even segregated communities, communities that are, you know, majority minority, and rich and safe for especially poor people of color, are able to have resources. Like there's no reason why we can only give communities resources once they're integrated, but that we have to try to do better by majority minority communities, which I mean, especially with respect
00:08:45
Speaker
to policing, you know, how those neighborhoods are policed is something that we have to be very thoughtful about. The clinic at one of our research projects during the pandemic was looking at how Newark was policed during pandemic, East Orange and Orange versus how, you know, South Orange, Maplewood, Montclair,
00:09:13
Speaker
were treated during the pandemic. Because of tipping points and things that you already know, tipping points, how many people of color are going to actually be able to integrate. We have to look at communities that are not integrated, I think, in a new way and make sure that we're treating those communities, right, equal.
CRT's Role in Addressing Systemic Oppression
00:09:38
Speaker
And so we spent in the clinic a lot of time, I mean, the last year and a half thinking about this and making sure that integration is not the only way to bring people into full citizenship. And I think that's how we used to see integration and certainly how, you know, during Brown, we were thinking about integration. It's like, this is the path to full citizenship, but
00:10:03
Speaker
This many years on, and I think you know this so well from Derrick Bell's work, that he was an early critique of us thinking that integration was the only way to bring people of color, black people, into full citizenship. And I think many of us realize the rightness of that analysis, right?
00:10:27
Speaker
In the clinic, we do fair housing work, which is pushing integration, that people who want and can't integrate should be given that opportunity and the country should be opened up for those people, but that people who can't or don't want to, that we have to keep our eye on them as well and how their communities are being shaped, particularly by the community.
00:10:49
Speaker
This is actually a really good segue to Critical Race Theory since you brought in Derrick Bell and Interest Convergence and his critique of Brown versus Board of Education. We co-taught Critical Race Theory last year. I really learned so much from your work or scholarship, the work that you do in the clinic.
00:11:09
Speaker
and I'm teaching Critical Race Theory on my own this semester. And I miss having you. I tell my clinic students, I know this is not Critical Race Theory, but if I could just share just a little bit. And I have a couple of our Critical Race Theory students in my clinic. And they're teaching with me to add a bit of credit to clinic. Oh, that's great. Well,
00:11:32
Speaker
It might be helpful for us to just have some just a general conversation about critical race theory. There's been a lot of pushback that we're seeing even last year when we were teaching. There was the executive order that President Trump issued and that thankfully went away, but it created a lot more support from those who are pushing back against teaching critical race theory in K through 12.
00:12:01
Speaker
but also in college. And so let's talk about that first. Let's explain what critical race theory is. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, I wanna name also that Thursday, this Thursday was Teach the Truth Day, Thursday, October, what was 14th, the days were slipping by so quickly. So yesterday was Teach Truth Day, which really reached, as you're saying, back K through 12,
00:12:30
Speaker
but also higher education in law school. You know, I feel like what I thought a lot about this question over the course of since we taught CRIT and it was under such a renewed attack last year.
00:12:44
Speaker
Some of what we're talking about is really not a conversation about critical race theory at all. I don't know what you think about this, but at the K-12 level, I don't think we're talking about critical race theory. That's right. I think we're talking about just plain old history. Do we want to teach history as it is documented, right? As historians know to be true, or do we want to continue to teach myths?
00:13:06
Speaker
to children. And I mean, I guess tying that to critical race theory, there's narrative and counter narrative is part of that. And we can talk about that. But I really feel like I wish we could separate out what K through 12
00:13:19
Speaker
teachers are trying or that conversation is about. To me, I just see that as about teaching history as it happened, as opposed to, as, you know, was taught when I was in elementary school, some mythical version of American exceptionalism that we like children to believe and that perpetuates all types of systems of oppression.
00:13:44
Speaker
It's just history. Critical race theory, on the other hand, I see, is really rooted in thinking about how our law can undo systems of oppression. Those same systems of oppression that, you know, keeping these myths going, reify. But that critical race theory itself, I believe, is really focused on the law.
Applying CRT in Legal Practice
00:14:06
Speaker
and undoing systems of oppression through the law such that I'm not sure that it is even something that's on the radar of the K through 12 teachers. I think this is maybe college in some disciplines and then really talking about a study of law in law school and praxis, which I try to, that's why I'm teaching,
00:14:33
Speaker
clinic. So the practice is marrying the legal theory with the practice of law in a way that helps us undo oppression. And I personally, having a litigator's background, think of it as ways to advance litigation that can undo oppression.
00:14:53
Speaker
So one of the theories that we study and teach, you know, talk together, and we continue to teach even in our different spaces, right, is entrance convergence, which Derrick Bell, you know, illuminated for us and says that the only time we're going to see real progress in race relations under the law
00:15:16
Speaker
is when white and black interests are able to align, right? And he gives us different examples of that, surely the civil rights movement being one of the most prominent. But I think in more recent times, the election of Barack Obama being another example of how white and black interests aligned in order to make space for this election of a black president
00:15:46
Speaker
And so, um, I think about that in litigation strategy. I try to teach my students to think about that litigation spec strategy. If we can go back to thinking about the pandemic, Newark made a restrictive stay at home order different than the governors that require, it was called silent Mondays and require the residents of Newark to stay home, even if they needed essential services on Mondays or else risk ticketing fines.
00:16:15
Speaker
fees or arrests. And this was an outlier. No other jurisdiction could we find that was doing this. In fact, the governor's order said that you could not be more restrictive than his order. In trying to figure out how might we persuade the jurisdiction to East Orange was also doing this, from doing this, we thought if we could, the white business owners were suffering.
00:16:43
Speaker
They were meeting and they were saying, because everyone's at home, we have no customers. It's already bad enough that Rutgers is closed, right? Like Rutgers is happening online. The students weren't feeding the businesses. And so we try to connect with the white business owners and say, if we could help them advance this plea to the government to stop these silent Mondays,
00:17:13
Speaker
and other restrictions because they were hurting their business. And, you know, we don't want business to leave Newark that that intersection with poor black people living in Newark and white business owners or non-black business owners might move the ball along in advanced black interests. So I really feel CRT in its, you know, purest form is about
Teaching Anti-Racism in Law
00:17:40
Speaker
the law in advancing, advancing the law, opening up the law to in, in, you know, kind of dealing with anti-black racism among other oppressed, you know, groups. And I want to keep talking about critical race theory, but then also talk about
00:17:58
Speaker
Newark in particular and the work that you're doing with your students. And I was struck by how Newark and surrounding areas are surveilled differently and by the police and treated differently by the government. So I want to make sure we spend time talking about that. But just to
00:18:16
Speaker
go back to critical race theory and what we mean by it, you're right. This is about how law was instrumental in subordinating Black people and other people of color and how there's a systemic structural problem that we have in law. And that's not what is actually being taught
00:18:37
Speaker
in K-12. I wish that is being taught, but right now it just seems as if the pushback focuses more on, as you said, the study of history and presenting a counter narrative to
00:18:51
Speaker
what, to slavery or to the Holocaust? What other counter narrative could there be that would be supported by the facts? It's just really, in my mind, I suppose it depends. There are different
00:19:11
Speaker
I guess others have said alternative facts, but there are just some basic truths in history that ought to be presented. And it seems as if the pushback to critical race theory is more about opening up conversations that our US, that our American history is
00:19:28
Speaker
has perpetuated racism and also there continues to be racism today. And yeah, it's just really interesting to see, to hear about these legislation across the states seeking to attempt to cut off funding for schools and trying to intimidate teachers who are basically just trying to teach history from a broader perspective.
00:19:55
Speaker
That in my mind relates to the work that you do in the clinic with respect to anti-racist pedagogy and anti-racist praxis or critical race praxis. You recently wrote an article about what it means to teach in the clinic and to engage in that kind of anti-racist pedagogy.
00:20:16
Speaker
And I'm going to quote you here. This is from your piece from the Clinical Law Review. You wrote, I have settled on a non-exhaustive list of principles that I believe should guide my teaching, practice, and scholarship on the road to anti-racism and which may be helpful to others. One, centering blackness. Two, mapping critical race theory onto clinical pedagogy. Three, citing black women.
00:20:40
Speaker
and four, aligning with Black folks, envisioning the Afro future where Black Lives Matter is not an aspirational proposition. Narinda, I read that and I had goosebumps. I did because it's such so powerful, such powerful statements about what we need to be doing, not only in the clinic, but in how we teach, right?
00:21:06
Speaker
Tell me more about what inspired you to write this piece and the ideas that you shared in the piece. Yeah. Thank you for that. I was asked to write this piece.
00:21:21
Speaker
I'm glad I did. I'm glad that sometimes you don't even know what you need to do. I'm glad that I got the request, and then I have a problem saying no, so I said yes, and it was great. The editors of the piece, it's in the Clinical Law Review, and Samir Shah.
00:21:43
Speaker
Munir and Jeff Selbin. They were great editors and really helped me crystallize what I was trying to say. But I also have to say thank you to Kristin Ondersma and Brandon Paradise, who co-authored the Rutgers Anti-Racism Statement with me. And I guess, I mean, almost, I don't know, two years now, time is just racing on.
00:22:11
Speaker
because it's that piece that where I, well, you know, I start with George Floyd is dead. George Floyd is murdered. And I want to lift up his name in Breonna Taylor's name because that's where all of this comes from. And then our anti-racism statement really helped, I think us all consider how the murders that continue to happen should affect what we're doing in law school, right?
00:22:41
Speaker
these murders continue to be found legal many times, right? George Floyd is an outlier that Derek Chauvin is in jail now is an anomaly. It is not the normal case. No one has yet to be arrested in the murder of Breonna Taylor. And so it calls us all to think, how is this legal? What law do we serve? And can we really continue to
00:23:09
Speaker
do everything as per normal under these circumstances, when this is what, especially at a law school like ours, where social justice is a huge part of our legacy and our mission, from Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Arthur Canoy to Elizabeth Warren continue to watch her do this work that she does right now.
00:23:31
Speaker
That's kind of where I situated myself and like the legacy of this law school and what we can do to change how we teach. I continue on from your question about critical race theory to change how we teach law under these circumstances. I would just say that I then started to mind the Black Lives Matter movement for answers.
00:23:59
Speaker
because we need to be in conversation with the Black Lives Matter movement, other movements on the ground.
00:24:08
Speaker
But also it seemed to me that they were ahead of us in thinking about what needed to happen inside the law. I mean, oddly enough, right? We're the law professors, we're the lawyers, but it seemed as if, and this is the more I think about it, it's not oddly enough when we go back even to abolition, right? The slave, enslaved people knew how the law needed to change when we go back to the civil rights era.
00:24:34
Speaker
the marchers and the protesters knew how the law
Challenges in Anti-Racist Pedagogy
00:24:37
Speaker
needed to change. So I end on, you know, saying we needed to, of course, we needed to look to the ground, but took me a while to get there. And so I mind, you know, as the movement was happening outside our doors, thinking about what does this mean for how we teach law and centering Blackness. So I want to just acknowledge that some of these thoughts are mean, minding the movement,
00:25:02
Speaker
trying to listen and learn in real time and say how can I use what it seems like some folks already have ideated on to enhance my teaching. And I came up with these four
00:25:18
Speaker
propositions, which I think are, and you've read this, they're pre-figurative. This is not the work. I think there's other deeper work we need to do surely, but I feel like this is work we could do right away, right now, even as we try to figure out some of the other larger things that we need to do. In Centering Blackness, I just talk about clinical pedagogy. We center white male students when we teach clinics.
00:25:46
Speaker
Most of what we write about, even when we're talking about being client centered, is how do you manage to talk to a Black poor woman when you're white, male, and privileged? And so much is written from the space of it might be hard for you to do that. We don't consider so much how hard it is for her to talk to this law student, this white male privileged law student, how hard it is to exist in this system.
00:26:12
Speaker
how to come into the system that, you know, is stacked against you. There's so little written thought about in terms of what it means to be, you know, black woman, for goodness gracious, not queer, in a clinical setting. And so one thing I felt was really low-hanging fruit
00:26:37
Speaker
was that we have to stop being afraid to talk about race, to name race, to name race in our classes, to name race in the courtroom, to name race in our, you know, we have to be able to be comfortable talking about race. And we have to do it from the perspective really of the client and not from the law student, which is controversial, right? Because we're in the business of servicing law students. We are really in a tough position because law students are our client too.
00:27:06
Speaker
We have, you know, all students are our clients. We want to make them happy. We want them to feel heard and we want to see them. But in clinic in particular with our clients, I think we have to try to convince our students that they are not the ultimate client there. That we have all of us together have an obligation, an ethical obligation to see the client who is being interacting with this legal system in her fullness.
00:27:33
Speaker
But there's also the site black woman movement was moving along. And I say in the paper, my syllabus one another thing that we can do right away is audit our syllabi. Are we citing to people of color? Are we citing to women of color? Are we citing queer people? Are we citing ourselves when we're women of color and queer people? You know, we will marginalize our own selves because we
00:28:00
Speaker
are not used to self-promoting in one, in one respect, right? But also that we maybe buy into a narrative of whose intellectual production is more weighty, more valuable. And we need to undo that. I have tried to work on that this year. And again, it's difficult because there is so much out there and we only have so much space, right?
00:28:26
Speaker
And you want to give your students a range of options. But I think in many subjects, especially that come up in clinic, for me in housing, black women know more about housing and eviction and public housing than anybody else in this country. And so to not cite them, to not listen to them makes no sense. I want to say one more thing about organizers.
00:28:53
Speaker
and working with organizers, which is, I just want to admit, it's very difficult when you're talking about a semester timeframe. Organizing doesn't work in 14 week bites. Organizers don't work, you know, before five from nine to five during the school day. Organizers don't stop working. Organizers don't have finals. They don't care about midterms.
00:29:16
Speaker
These things, these structures that the law school works around, where we stop at periods of time, that's not how organizing works. And I feel like that is a real challenge to name. I've tried to work with organizers in clinics, this and others previously, it's not easy. I think we have to keep at it though. And one thing I know we're gonna talk about the anti-eviction project. One thing that the anti-eviction project has allowed me space to do is try to
00:29:45
Speaker
grow in my work with organizers, allowed us to hire, as a contractor, people who have really deep knowledge of organizing in Newark to work with us, to guide us. And it's a blessing, really, to be able to do that work. It's nerve wracking, right? Because it's not how we operate. A lot of this is happening at night and on the weekends.
00:30:13
Speaker
And, you know, where? I don't know, you know? And, but it's working. It's working and we're reaching people and I'm learning so much, right? So I just, I'll leave it there, but it's, I wouldn't acknowledge that it's not, none of this is easy nor have I mastered it. But it's something to, it means something when you write it down and you publish it in the clinical law review.
00:30:41
Speaker
You also have written in other areas about housing, the incarcerated and the Fair Housing Act, the limits of the Fair Housing Act, which ties back with some of what you said earlier about how the critiques of integration.
00:30:58
Speaker
But I want to just close up this conversation about your clinical teaching and ask you how are your students responding and how are students in the other clinics responding to the faculty's commitment to reviewing the way we teach clinical, our classes, our seminars and the way that we teach in the clinic. What has been the response that you've heard from students so far? Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. I want to
00:31:28
Speaker
I think the response from my students has been great. Another part of the work that we're doing as a law school, as you already know, is just thinking about all the ways in which we can be more anti-racist, right? Not just in our teaching, but I've been really committed to recruiting clinic students. So it's not always that the clinic is diverse itself. And I've been trying to search inside myself and amongst our colleagues and why is that so?
00:31:55
Speaker
And we talk about first-generation students. Maybe they don't even know what clinic means. Maybe they don't know what clinic can do for your resume. Maybe they don't know what the deadlines are. The process is not necessarily intuitive. You don't register for clinic.
00:32:09
Speaker
in the same way that you register for other classes. Clinic registration starts earlier. There's a lottery. There's preferences. It's not all intuitive. I've been trying to talk with some of our student organizations where our students of color are members to try to demystify that process.
00:32:31
Speaker
and make myself available earlier and often, which I know is also very difficult because we're also busy and we're in pandemic and we're remote. How do you make yourself more available? But try to make myself more available. So I say that to say my clinic is astounding to me. I have no white women in my clinic and I have two white men in my clinic. I have four women of color, like four black women in one
00:32:59
Speaker
I'm Latino woman in my clinic, which is just, I mean, it's really astounding for any clinic anywhere to have that many, that kind of diversity. I have one black man as well. I want to forget his records in there. So.
00:33:14
Speaker
Those students are here for this. Like they were writing me over the summer, like, this is what I want to do. I want to do this work. You know, we were in touch beforehand. I'm not sure if that's a metric for how this might play out when I talk to my colleagues in other parts of the country, in schools that are less diverse than ours, in schools that are, you know, politically, maybe this could be a third rail.
00:33:39
Speaker
where it's not here, right? So I had to start, this is why I had to start with saying, yeah, we issued the statement. I know that my school is maybe more ripe, more ready for this kind of open conversation with professors and students than others. So that's another reason why I had to start with our statement. I felt, to acknowledge that I'm in a place where I think we can do this. So my students are ready. We had a, I wanna tell you that we had a,
00:34:08
Speaker
class on movement lawyering this week on Wednesday. And we have some of our student leaders in, and we invited all the clinics to come. Any clinic could come. I co-teach with Professor Dubin and Professor Cohen and Vince Warren, our alum, who is the executive director of CCR, came and joined us, but he's also on the advisory board to Law for Black Lives. And he invited the director of Law for Black Lives, Marbrey Staley Butts.
00:34:35
Speaker
We had a beautiful conversation. We played music. They have a playlist on their website that they share with people to enrich them. We played music. We we've read from Angela Davis's Abolition Democracy. We've read from Adrian Marie Brown's Emergent Strategies. We talked about fear in movements. We talked about, you know, the
00:34:59
Speaker
how this is an international, all these issues we're talking about are really plaguing black people internationally and like the connections comparatively across the world. It was really beautiful. And so some of the students when we got, I moderate the conversation and then we opened it up from students questions and some of the students said this was one of the most, I mean, they said this was the most meaningful thing that has happened to me in law school.
00:35:27
Speaker
hearing from people who are doing this work that I hope to be doing and knowing that I can get there, right? Knowing that I can get there, that fear is natural. Vince talked about, like, do you not think enslaved people were afraid? Yes. And he talked about conversations that he'd had during the anniversary of the march across the Pettus Bridge with those who did that work, right? Of course they were afraid. Of course they were afraid.
00:35:57
Speaker
He talked about talking to Diane Nash specifically about fear and how you get over and move through that fear for your people and for black liberation. So I feel like there's a certain segment of our student population in particular for whom our law school curriculum often doesn't speak to them at all, right? Not just our law school, but any law school curriculum doesn't speak to them and what they're trying to achieve in their lives through the law.
00:36:24
Speaker
And that what we're doing is just creating options that they can tap into, that keep them elevated and keep them spirited and help them know that they've not chosen the wrong path. So it remains to be seen whether this will work writ large, right? But I feel like for a segment of our population, maybe small, maybe not,
Location's Effect on Policing and Gentrification
00:36:48
Speaker
This has really, I think, been a good move for us to provide these opportunities for them. I think many of our students and prospective students will agree with you. Let's talk about how Newark in particular, which is where we are located,
00:37:10
Speaker
that how residents are treated differently by the police, by the government. And you said earlier, we started by talking about place geography and the impact that plays in citizens and members of people who live here.
00:37:28
Speaker
tell me a little bit more about what you're seeing on the ground with respect to treatment by the police and also how that might tie into other government interactions with respect to losing their homes. Their homes, right. Yeah. So our colleague David Trout studies a lot of gentrification
00:37:56
Speaker
patterns, right? His work really looks at, and he says something that I think about a lot, which is that Newark is in a pre-gentrification phase. So I think about what is happening. I think that is very deeply connected to what is happening in terms of the eviction crisis, which is what's happening pre-pandemic has somewhat been flat for most of the pandemic, and we expect to just shoot up now that courts are open and the
00:38:26
Speaker
more torrents on eviction which had been in place since the pandemic started are lifting. And I say that because what we see often in gentrification, places that are gentrifying or planning to gentrify or hoping to gentrify,
00:38:48
Speaker
is that you have to displace the historic residence first. You have to clear out. And this clearing happens in many ways. When I first got here, there was a lot being done and said about the Terrell homes. And I think Newark has gotten a bad rap, Brick City, people thinking that that came from a drug, some kind of drug analogy, where it really is about the little bricks
00:39:14
Speaker
which is all these red brick housing projects that were in Newark and for where many of the historic residents lived, historically black residents lived, because there's another population that's also being attacked, Portuguese and the Spanish population, the Latinx population is also under attack.
00:39:39
Speaker
And so, you know, getting rid of all these housing projects was early, early, and has been going on for a while with Section E now being, and I should say Newark Housing Authority is the largest landlord in the city of Newark. It's also the largest evictor in the city of Newark. What's really quite, you know, unacceptable about that is that Newark Housing Authority is
00:40:09
Speaker
charged with housing people who can't afford it. That's their job. That's their only job is to house people who can't afford to pay market rent. And the way the program works is it adjusts for when you have more or less money. It can always adjust. Why are we evicting people for non-payment when they don't have money, when your job is to adjust to meet them where they are? Those market forces are not
00:40:38
Speaker
just out there. New York Housing Authority is not acting out in a bubble. This is a part of a clearing process. We have to see that for the policing is a part of a clearing process. The evictions is a part of a clearing process. The criminalization of homelessness in this
00:41:01
Speaker
city, you know, two summers ago, the city changed its laws to prohibit panhandling. That's protected First Amendment activity. Not only did they prohibit panhandling, they find the homeless people or the people in the street who were panhandling $500 and find people who were giving the money 50. You can't pay the fine, so then you get arrested.
00:41:31
Speaker
I mean, these are the kinds of schemes that we see in this pre-gentrification phase to clear people, to make people afraid to be where they live, and they move on to somewhere else. So we've been trying to, you know, when the law came up, we wrote, this is the First Amendment protected activity, the panhandling, coming out of your house,
00:42:01
Speaker
your right to associate, your right to freely walk around, you know, all of these things the clinic has tried to weigh in on, but it is not easy. And I, you know, I just want to say too that people who are used to being policed in this manner, who is our client? No one actually comes to us and says they shouldn't do this.
00:42:31
Speaker
it's rare that people come to the clinic and say, they shouldn't do this to us, which is so troubling to me. And I think there's something about normalizing this kind of policing activity to the point where people don't challenge it. And as you know, for the clinic, ethically, where's our client? You're seeing these things, but you don't have a client because people think it's normal.
00:42:59
Speaker
They don't fight against it. It puts us in a tough place, but it's hard to drive and see, you know, signs posted that criminalizes legal activity. So I think we're in that phase, as David says, and I think that as an anchor institution, our school, our university has a role to play to preserve the right of all people to live in Newark.
Supporting Anti-Eviction Efforts
00:43:24
Speaker
And that's what the clinic tries to do in its own small way is to keep Newark open to everyone who wants to live here, especially those who have called this home for generations. And we're grateful to you and your students for working on these issues.
00:43:40
Speaker
You mentioned earlier that there's this anti eviction project that the clinic will be working on specifically tell us about the grants that we received from the state. And we should also mention that our colleagues in Camden are also working on similar issues on housing related issues. And so we also receive money in order to make sure that students
00:44:05
Speaker
in Camden and more specifically clients who are located near Camden will also receive the same kind of support. But tell me about what the housing project looks like here in Newark. Yes, what I want to just think obviously, council members, alleged members of the legislature that helped push this along, bring this to the governor's attention and the governor in his office for being so supportive of this work, right? This
00:44:35
Speaker
We received an appropriation that allows us to, I mean, it's almost a miracle in a way, $1.1 million to each campus to do anti eviction work. And there's so many things that we hope to do with this,
00:45:03
Speaker
capacity building grant that we received, including, as I mentioned, alluded to earlier, including working with communities to make sure that folks know that they can certify to the court and say they had financial difficulty during the pandemic and could not pay their rent. That helps the process.
00:45:31
Speaker
by in certain cases when you're at a certain socioeconomic level, preventing your landlord from evicting you. It's a huge deal, but a lot of people don't know about it. And so the first thing we're doing is connecting with organizers on the ground. We're going to have another action tomorrow. We're joined with Newark Water Coalition. They give out food and clean water at sites
00:46:00
Speaker
in New York and we've joined with them to go to those sites. We've created some short videos that we play during these distributions to let people know that they can certify that they had trouble paying their rent during the pandemic.
00:46:19
Speaker
with the court, we share the website, we've got t-shirts made, we've got flyers made, we've got websites going just to let people know, like certify to say you had trouble because that can stop the process. But also, even if you aren't in this economic band that will stop the process altogether for you,
00:46:40
Speaker
There's emergency rental assistance program, the emergency rental assistance program, which can cover your rent. And we're also sharing that information out with people at these actions where we go. We create a QR code so people can just scan it at home, fill out the paperwork in and try to get this process of getting funding and help because so many people don't know that this is available.
00:47:07
Speaker
So that's the first thing that we're doing. We're also trying to find, we went through and found, I told you about Newark Housing Authority being the largest evictor. We tried to track every case they filed for eviction since the pandemic started. We've been trying to reach out to those
00:47:28
Speaker
voucher holders and let them know when their eviction date is because many people don't realize that they're being evicted and let them know that they need to appear at court. We also offer our services if they want for us to represent them in hopes that we could negotiate with their landlord to stop this process, allow them to apply for emergency rental assistance.
00:47:53
Speaker
Um, if that doesn't work, then we've been able with this appropriation to, um, bring on, um, a staff, some staff, additional staff license attorney. So the students are handling all of this, the know your rights, they're handling representing the folks in the hearings, but also we have more barred attorney capacity.
00:48:14
Speaker
if we can't, those first steps don't work. So those are the early steps that we're taking. Know your rights, trying to move in the community, make sure people know what options are available to them, represent people at hearings, and then also having capacity to represent people at trials if it comes to that.
Aligning Legal Education with Community Needs
00:48:32
Speaker
Thank you. You and your students are doing such compelling
00:48:36
Speaker
important work and we're all grateful to all of you. There's so much more that we can talk about, but we unfortunately need to wrap up. I want to thank you again for visiting with us this morning for talking about the work that you're doing in the clinic, anti-racist pedagogy, the anti-adiction project, and also what it was like for you to how you got to where you are. I think many of our listeners appreciate it and can
00:49:06
Speaker
relate to the experience that you had. And so I think I just wanted to plug in one last thing that you wrote about. And it was the housing, the decarcerated article that is forthcoming in the California Law Review. I was really struck by the way that you describe cultural exclusion.
00:49:29
Speaker
how various laws have led to not only physical exclusion, but also cultural exclusion of people who have been decarcerated, people with criminal backgrounds and other interactions with the police. We don't have enough time to talk about it, but I urge listeners to read her article. It's posted on SSRN. I wanted to give you just one last opportunity to
00:49:55
Speaker
to maybe to close up and to close this conversation and share final thoughts that you might have about the work that you're doing in the clinic and with Rutgers Law School.
Conclusion and Rutgers Law School Promotion
00:50:07
Speaker
Thank you, Rose. Thank you so much for having me. I just want to say that first and
00:50:11
Speaker
I want to close in thinking, elevating something that I've learned from recently studying Adrienne Marie Brown's work on emerging strategies, which is that we have to move at the speed of trust. And I've been trying to let that guide me both with the students and communities. And I urge others to try to do the same, right? We want to get somewhere.
00:50:32
Speaker
but we can only get somewhere if we're really going the place that the people need us to go. And we won't know where that is as lawyers. We're not the ones that determine where we go next, right? It's the people that we're in service to. And so I've been trying to slow down and move at the speed of trust. And, you know, that's difficult for many of us, but that's where I'm going to end. That's great. Thank you so much, Norenda.
00:50:59
Speaker
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