The 20th Annual Rebellious Lawyering Conference
Yale Law School, New Haven, Connecticut
February 22 and 23, 2013
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Bryan Stevenson, Keynote Speaker
Bryan A. Stevenson is the founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a private, non-profit organization headquartered in Montgomery, Alabama, and is a professor at New York University School of Law. He has gained national acclaim for his work challenging bias against the poor and people of color in the criminal justice system. Most recently, Professor Stevenson successfully litigated a ground-breaking Supreme Court case that struck down mandatory life without parole sentences for juveniles as unconstitutional.
A graduate of Eastern College (now Eastern University), Harvard Law School (J.D.), and the Harvard School of Government, he has won the American Bar Association's Wisdom Award for public service, the ACLU's National Medal of Liberty (1991), a MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Award, the Reebok Human Rights Award (1989), the Thurgood Marshall Medal of Justice (1993), the Gleitsman Foundation Citizen Activist Award (2000), the Olof Palme Prize (2000), Stanford Law School's National Public Service Award (2010), and the National Association of Public Interest Lawyers named him the Public Interest Lawyer of the Year (1996). He has received honorary degrees from the University of Pennsylvania School of Law and Georgetown University Law School. In addition to directing the Equal Justice Initiative, he has been a visiting professor of law at the University of Michigan School of Law and lecturer at Harvard and Yale Law Schools.
He is a co-recipient of the 2009 Gruber Prize for Justice. The Gruber Foundation Justice Prize is presented to individuals or organizations for contributions that have advanced the cause of justice as delivered through the legal system. In 2010, the NAACP honored Stevenson by awarding him the William Robert Ming Advocacy Award for the spirit of financial and personal sacrifice displayed in his legal work.†
Benita Veliz
Benita Veliz is the first undocumented person to have addressed a national political convention. Brought to Texas from Mexico as a child on a tourist visa, Benita remained and grew up in the U.S. after her visa expired. Veliz was the valedictorian of her high school at age 16, and described herself as feeling "just as American as any of my friends or neighbors." She now has temporary residential status under President Barack Obama's policy directive granting a deportation reprieve to promising young individuals who were brought to the U.S. illegally before their sixteenth birthday.