Yale Club of New Haven November Luncheon & Speakers

193 Whitney Avenue,New Haven CT 06511

08 November, 2022

Description

Title: Introducing the Yale Law and Racial Justice Center Kayla Vinson and James Forman, Jr. will discuss the newly launched Yale Law and Racial Justice Center, whose work includes the Access to Law School Program, an innovative pipeline program. James Forman Jr. is the J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He attended public schools in Detroit, New York City, and Atlanta, then Brown University and Yale Law School. Forman began his legal career as a staff attorney at Washington D.C.’s Public Defender Service. While there, he co-founded the Maya Angelou School, which serves young people who have struggled in school, dropped out, or have been arrested. The school has grown to five campuses and is currently celebrating 25 years of service. Professor Forman teaches criminal law and a seminar called Inside Out: Issues in Criminal Justice, in which Yale students’ study alongside incarcerated men and women. He is the faculty director of the Yale Center for Law and Racial Justice and the founder of the Access to Law School Program, an innovative pipeline program serving first-generation and under-represented students from New Haven who wish to pursue a legal career. His first book, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize. Kayla Vinson is the Executive Director of the Law and Racial Justice Center. After graduating from Yale College, she began a career as a public-school educator, teaching African American History, U.S. History, and World History in Philadelphia, Brooklyn, and Harlem. Kayla began her legal career working as an attorney in Montgomery, Alabama, where her docket included appellate and post-conviction legal representation, reentry support, memory work and curriculum development on the legacy of racial injustice in the United States, and research and writing about the function of white supremacy in the criminal legal system. Kayla’s work is animating by her belief that understanding how the afterlife of chattel slavery mediates life, opportunity, development, and underdevelopment in the United States is critical to building a new world.