Instructors

Corinne Blalock is the Executive Director of the Law and Political Economy Project and an Associate Research Scholar at Yale Law School. Her research draws on her education in both law and critical theory to explore how political economy and market logic transform and limit the ways we imagine our society and the role of government in it. Corinne has been at the LPE Project since it started. Prior to joining the LPE Project, Corinne was a fellow at the Center for Race, Law, and Politics at Duke Law School while completing her PhD. Her dissertation, The Privatization of Protection: The Neoliberal Fourteenth Amendment, traces how the liberal ideals of equal protection and due process have been redefined according to the needs, logics, and limits of the market with material consequences disproportionately borne by the poor and working class. Corinne recently edited a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly on “Law and the Critique of Capitalism” published in April 2022.

Andrew Crespo ​​is the Morris Wasserstein Public Interest Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, where he teaches criminal law and procedure and serves as the Executive Faculty Director of the Institute to End Mass Incarceration. Professor Crespo’s research and scholarly expertise center on the institutional design, legal frameworks, and power structures of the American penal system, and on the relationship between lawyers, organizers, and social movement actors in effecting transformational change. Through his leadership of the Institute to End Mass Incarceration, Professor Crespo works to develop modes of legal practice that integrate lawyers effectively and responsibly into organizer-led anti-carceral campaigns and movements.

His scholarship has been honored by the Association of American Law Schools and profiled in The New York Times, with his leading articles appearing in the Harvard Law Review, the Columbia Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal. Together with John Rappaport, he is the author of Criminal Law and the American Penal System, an innovative forthcoming casebook that recasts the traditionally required criminal law course as a class about the role law and lawyers have played in building and sustaining American mass incarceration.

Marika Dias is the Managing Director of the Urban Justice Center’s Safety Net Project (SNP). She is a public interest attorney who has worked in civil legal services since 2001 with a focus on providing legal services that support community organizing efforts and grassroots organizing groups. Prior to her role at SNP, Marika was the Director of the Tenant Rights Coalition at Legal Services NYC and before that, she was the Managing Attorney at Make the Road New York. Marika is a member of the Steering Committee of the Right to Counsel NYC Coalition, on the Advisory Board for the Housing Justice Leadership Institute, part of Right to the City’s legal committee, and a movement lawyering trainer.

Larry Engelstein retired as SEIU 32BJ Secretary-Treasurer in 2020 having worked there in various capacities starting in 1999. Before then, he was an Associate General Counsel at the AFL-CIO (1996-1999) and SEIU (1989-1996), an associate at labor law firms in Boston and Chicago, and a community organizer in Chicago (1976-1980). A New York City native, he is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin, Madison (1975) and Northwestern University School of Law (1983).

Andrew Friedman is the Director of the Initiative for Community Power at NYU School of Law. He is also the Senior Director of Strategy and co-founder of The Action Lab. He founded the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD), the largest federated network of community organizing groups in the United States, in 2012 and co-lead the organization for 10 years. Andrew previously co-founded and spent 15 years building Make the Road New York into the leading democratically run, immigrant-led community organization in New York State. Andrew helped found Local Progress, a national network of progressive municipal elected officials. Andrew has taught at the NYU School of Law, Cardozo School of Law, the New School for Social Research and Columbia Law School. He is on the Board of Directors of Make the Road Action, the Action Lab and the Editorial Advisory Board of The Forge. Andrew is a graduate of Columbia College and the New York University School of Law. Most importantly, Andrew is the overjoyed and proud father of three beautiful boys.

Matthew is a lifelong learner and educator who believes firmly in the power of political education as a means for our collective freedom. He is a practitioner of revolutionary Pan-Africanism, doing his best to walk in the footsteps of giants like Alice Kinloch and George Jackson. Like many Afrikans born and raised in the United States, Matthew has always sought answers to deep political questions centering on capitalism, imperialism, identity, and related phenomena. Ironically, while he has spent time in both college and law school, he finds that academic spaces have a tendency to police knowledge; he agrees with Dylan Rodriguez that it is instead crucial to “obsolete the academic” and ensure that knowledge and information travel freely, reaching all who want and/or need to access it. This approach is a huge part of what grounds Matthew’s approach to organizing. Two more principles ground Matthew: for one, having a collective approach to study and struggle; and most important of all, centering the populations most affected by oppression and ensuring they are the leaders in our fight for liberation.

Jennifer Hernandez is a Lead Organizer at Make the Road New York with several years of experience organizing in immigrant and faith communities. Jennifer leads the organization's Housing campaigns, organizing tenants across New York City and the Westchester county area. Before joining Make the Road, she was an organizer at Centro Presente, an immigrant rights group in Boston, where she led successful campaigns to protect immigrants. She is an expert at developing leadership of grassroots community members and mobilizing faith communities. Jennifer has a Masters of Divinity in Liberation Theology from Harvard University. Her organizing work is informed by her experience as a daughter of undocumented parents growing up in the vibrant immigrant community of Washington Heights.

Tarek Z. Ismail is an Associate Professor of Law at the CUNY School of Law, where he co-directs the Family Defense Practicum, Family Law Practice Clinic, and is Counsel to the Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility (CLEAR) Project. Prior to joining CUNY Law’s faculty, he was Senior Staff Attorney at CLEAR which primarily aims to address the legal needs of communities and movements targeted by national security and counterterrorism policies and practices deployed by various law enforcement agencies. Tarek’s research and writing focuses on the surveillance, policing, and separation of families.

Amy Kapczynski is a Professor of Law at Yale Law School, Faculty Co-Director of the Global Health Justice Partnership, and Faculty Co-Director of the Law and Political Economy Project and cofounder of the Law and Political Economy blog. She joined the Yale Law faculty in January 2012. Her areas of research include law and political economy, information policy, intellectual property law, international law, and health justice. She has also done work with organizers and activists around access to medicines issues for several decades, and more recently around drug pricing and health justice issues in the US.  Prior to coming to Yale, she taught at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. She also served as a law clerk to Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Stephen G. Breyer at the U.S. Supreme Court, and to Judge Guido Calabresi on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. She received her A.B. from Princeton University, M. Phil. from Cambridge University, M.A. from Queen Mary and Westfield College at University of London, and J.D. from Yale Law School.

Brishen Rogers is a Professor of Law at Georgetown Law. He teaches torts, employment law, employment discrimination, and various labor law courses. Professor Rogers’ research explores the relationship between labor and employment laws and class formation processes. He recently published a book entitled Data and Democracy at Work: Advanced Information Technologies, Labor Law, and the New Working Class (The MIT Press). In addition to his law review publications, he has recently written for the Boston Review, the Washington Post Outlook, Onlabor.org, and ACSblog, the blog of the American Constitution Society. Professor Rogers’ scholarship has been cited in landmark decisions by the California Supreme Court and the European Court of Justice. Professor Rogers received his J.D., cum laude, from Harvard Law School and his B.A., with high distinction from the University of Virginia. Prior to law school, he worked as a community organizer promoting living wage policies and affordable housing, and spent several years organizing workers as part of SEIU’s “Justice for Janitors” campaign.

Marbre Stahly-Butts is an Associate Professor at the CUNY School of Law, where she teaches Liberty, Equality, and Due Process as well as Critical Race Theory. She is the co-founder and former Executive Director of Law for Black Lives has worked closely with organizers and communities across the country to advance and actualize radical policy. She co-founded and served on the Leadership Team of the Movement for Black Lives Policy Table and was one of the chief architects of the Vision for Black Lives Policy Platform. Since graduating from Yale Law School, Marbré has supported local and national organizations from across the country in their policy development and advocacy. She was a co-founder of the National Bail Out Collective and the People’s Coalition for Safety and Freedom. Before her role at Law for Black Lives Marbré worked as Deputy Director of Racial Justice at the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD). She joined CPD as a Soros Justice Fellow in Fall 2013. Her Soros Justice work focused on organizing and working with families affected by aggressive policing and criminal justice policies in New York City in order to develop meaningful bottom-up policy reforms. While in law school, Marbré focused on the intersection of criminal justice and civil rights and gained legal experience with the Bronx Defenders, the Equal Justice Initiative, and the Prison Policy Initiative. Before law school, Marbré received her Masters in African Studies from Oxford University and studied in Zimbabwe, where she focused on community responses to violence. She also taught in South Africa at Nelson Mandela’s alma mater. Marbré graduated from Columbia University, with a B.A. in African-American History and Human Rights. In addition to her work to support and build movement Marbré is busy trying to raise two young children to be joyful and purpose-filled people.

Daniela Tagtachian is a Senior Fellow with The Action Lab and NYU School of Law’s Initiative for COmmunity Power. She is also a poverty lawyer and a sociology PhD student at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). She received her BA in Political Science from the University of Chicago in 2012 and her JD from the University of Michigan Law School in 2016. Prior to joining CUNY, she was a Mysun Foundation Fellow and a lecturer-in-law at the University of Miami School of Law Environmental Justice Clinic. While there, as a community lawyer, she focused on empowering minority communities and addressing systemic inequity through projects such as the development of anti-displacement strategies. As a doctoral student, her research interests include municipal equity and the empowerment of minority communities, legal estrangement, inclusion/exclusion through civic engagement, structural inequity, the role of law in the perpetuation of inequality, social justice, and theories of social change.

John Whitlow is an Associate Professor at the CUNY School of Law, where he co-directs the Community and Economic Development Clinic (CEDC). Prior to entering academia, John was a Supervising Attorney at Make the Road New York and a Staff Attorney at the Urban Justice Center’s Community Development Project (now TakeRoot Justice). John’s writing has appeared in popular and academic forums, including The New York Times, the Albuquerque Journal, Counterpunch, the Law and Political Economy Blog, the Fordham Urban Law Journal, the South Atlantic Quarterly, and the CUNY Law Review. John was the Inaugural Visiting Faculty Fellow at Yale Law School’s Law and Political Economy Project and he currently serves on the Board of Directors of The Action Lab. John holds a B.A. and a certificate in comparative international economic development from Johns Hopkins University, an M.A. from the New School for Social Research, and a J.D. from the CUNY School of Law.