Russ Feingold, ACS President

Ruth Bader Ginsburg Award: Leah Litman

David Carliner Public Interest Award: Oren Nimni

Zinelle October and Hon. Justin J. Pearson

Lifetime Achievement Award: Sherrilyn Ifill

We Are ACS

More photos coming soon!

FEATURED SPEAKERS

Keith Ellison Minnesota Attorney General

Justin J. Pearson Tennessee State Representative, 86th District

Lifetime Achievement Award

Sherrilyn Ifill Senior Fellow, Ford Foundation; President and Director-Counsel Emeritus, NAACP Legal Defense Fund

Ruth Bader Ginsburg Scholar Award

Leah Litman Professor of Law University of Michigan School of Law

The David Carliner Public Interest Award

Oren Nimni Litigation Director Rights Behind Bars

The Richard D. Cudahy Writing Competition on Regulatory and Administrative Law

Lawyer Category

Daniel Deacon and Leah Litman University of Michigan Law School

Student Category

Shunhe Wang Yale Law School, Class of 2023

Constance Baker Motley National Student Writing Competition

Arlo Blaisus Temple University Beasley School of Law, Class of 2024

Thursday, May 18

3:30 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.: #MeToo Task Force Workshop

This interactive workshop will examine the legal profession five years after the #MeToo movement gained national attention. In small breakout groups, we will discuss what has changed, what has not, and where to go from here.

Elizabeth Binczik (Panelist/Facilitator) Director of Policy and Program for Economic Justice American Constitution Society	Heidi Li Feldman (Facilitator) Professor of Law; Co-Director, Joint Degree in Law and Philosophy Georgetown Law
Michele Goodwin (Panelist/Facilitator) Chancellor’s Professor of Law, Director Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy UC Irvine School of Law	Mary Hanna-Weir (Facilitator) Deputy County Counsel County of Santa Clara Office of the County Counsel
Rachel Kitze Collins (Facilitator) Partner Lockridge Grindal Nauen P.L.L.P.	Joshua Matz (Panelist) Partner Kaplan Hecker & Fink LLP

PANELS

Friday, May 19

9:15 – 10:45 a.m.: Plenary Session 1

Dismantling the Tools of Tyranny

In the past decade, the world’s largest democracies (including countries like the United States, Brazil, India, and the Philippines) have been increasingly threatened by authoritarians and proto-authoritarians who weaponize various institutions and social biases to achieve greater political, economic, and social control. Their strategies include marginalizing and demonizing ethnic, racial, and sexual minorities, coopting the judiciary, exploiting the criminal legal system (including the use of the death penalty), and curtailing bodily autonomy, most notably over reproductive choices. How are these strategies being employed in the U.S. and what warning should we take? What lessons can we learn about combatting these efforts to achieve inclusive democracies?

Russ Feingold (Moderator) President American Constitution Society	Jamil Dakwar Director of the Human Rights Program American Civil Liberties Union
Craig Jackson Professor of Law Texas Southern University Thurgood Marshall School of Law	Kate Masur Professor of History, Board of Visitors Professor Northwestern University Weinburg College of Arts and Sciences
Alicia Ely Yamin Lecturer on Law and Senior Fellow on Global Health and Rights, Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics, Harvard Law School; Adjunct Senior Lecturer on Health Policy and Management, Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health; Senior Advisor on Human Rights and Health Policy, Partners In Health

11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.: Breakout Session 1

Advancing a New Era of Antitrust

The nomination and confirmation of progressives to lead the Department of Justice Antitrust Division and the Federal Trade Commission have created the opportunity to revive the progressive tradition of trust busting. This opportunity arises within the context of renewed efforts now underway to resurrect the field of regulated industries, which decades of deregulation killed. How can progressive lawyers, law students, and law scholars take advantage of these opportunities to advance a new era of antitrust?

Ganesh Sitaraman (Moderator) New York Alumni Chancellor’s Chair in Law and Director Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator for Political Economy and Regulation Vanderbilt Law School	Diana Moss President American Antitrust Institute
Zephyr Teachout Professor of Law Fordham University School of Law	Sandeep Vaheesan Legal Director Open Markets Institute

Beyond Color-Blindness: Confronting Legacies of Injustice

In recent years, revitalized movements for racial justice have spotlighted the continuing impact of genocide, slavery, segregation, and related systems of oppression in driving inequitable outcomes for people of color and called for affirmative measures to redress past harms. Meanwhile, through cases like Students for Fair Admissions, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority is advancing an ahistorical (and, when applied to sovereign Native tribes, inappropriate) “color-blind” reading of the Constitution, which threatens to derail these efforts. How can lawyers best support and contribute to movements to create a truly equitable society within this challenging legal landscape? How do we reckon with the law’s (past and continuing) role in perpetuating inequality? What should our legal frameworks around racial justice look like in the future?

Taonga Leslie (Moderator) Director of Policy and Program for Racial Justice American Constitution Society	Jonodev Chaudhuri Principal Chaudhuri Law
Damon Hewitt President and Executive Director Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law	Lourdes Rosado President and General Counsel LatinoJustice PRLDEF

Countering the Roberts Court’s Weaponizing of the First Amendment

The Supreme Court is poised to use the First Amendment to strike down laws aimed at addressing discrimination based on sexual orientation. The effect of this decision could ultimately extend to laws designed to protect against discrimination based on race, gender, and other protected classes. This and previous First Amendment cases raise questions about whose freedoms this Court is interested in protecting. Relying on dubious originalist notions about the Free Speech and Establishment Clauses, the Court is rewriting First Amendment Law. This is forcing progressives to decide whether to assert more religious freedom and freedom of speech claims given the Court’s leanings at the risk of allowing conservatives to further dictate the terms of the debate. What, then, are the long-term consequences of this movement?

Bradley Girard (Moderator) Litigation Counsel Americans United for Separation of Church and State	Tabatha Abu El-Haj Professor of Law Drexel University Thomas R. Kline School of Law
Nora Benavidez Senior Counsel and Director of Digital Justice and Civil Rights Free Press

1:00 – 2:15 p.m.: Broken Law Live Podcast Taping

ACS’s signature podcast, “Broken Law,” will host a live episode recording featuring Donald Sherman, Senior Vice President and Chief Counsel Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), and Mark Joseph Stern, Senior Writer at Slate, and hosted by Jeanne Hruska, ACS’s Senior Advisor for Communications and Strategy to discuss the biggest legal news and developments thus far in 2023.

Jeanne Hruska (Host) Senior Advisor for Communications and Strategy American Constitution Society	Donald Sherman Senior Vice President and Chief Counsel Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW)
Mark Joseph Stern Senior Writer Slate

3:00 – 4:00 p.m.: Breakout Session 2

One Year Later: Advocating in the Aftermath of Dobbs

One year after the Court’s disastrous decision in Dobbs, patients, health care providers, and advocates are still sorting through the resulting fallout. State officials continue to pursue abortion bans and restrictions in some states while others work to expand access to their residents while also managing the flood of patients crossing borders seeking care. And prosecutors are left to decide how to best exercise their discretion in states and localities with abortion bans. How has the shift to the states played out on the ground? What can attorneys learn from the past year about the future of progressive movement lawyering when it comes to abortion rights?

Jenny Ma (Moderator) Senior Counsel Center for Reproductive Rights	Carrie Flaxman Senior Director, Public Policy Litigation and Law Planned Parenthood Federation of America
Maya Manian Professor of Law and Faculty Director Health Law and Policy Program American University Washington College of Law	Melissa Torres-Montoya Senior Lawyer Engagement Manager If/When/How

Entrenched: The Fight for Meaningful Representation in the Shadow of the Supreme Court

This term the Court heard two cases that will be highly consequential in the pursuit of a truly multiracial democracy – Allen v. Milligan, a case that could gut what remains of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and severely hamper meaningful representation for marginalized communities, and Moore v. Harper, which has the potential to rewrite election law if the Court adopts the so-called “Independent State Legislature Theory.” In 2019, the Court already allowed states to gerrymander districts for partisan gain. If the Court rules against pro-voter plaintiffs this term, it will further open the floodgates for state legislators to pursue racially gerrymandered districts and entrench themselves beyond the reach of state courts or state constitutional protections.  How can progressives fight this move toward extreme concentration of power in state legislatures?  What redress will disenfranchised voters have to vindicate their rights if the Court adopts the ISLT?  What reforms are needed and how can they be achieved?

Justin Levitt (Moderator) Professor of Law and Gerald T. McLaughlin Fellow Loyola Marymount University Law School	Spencer Overton Patricia Roberts Harris Research Professorship and Professor of Law The George Washington University Law School
Deuel Ross Deputy Director of Litigation NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.	Poy Winichakul Senior Staff Attorney Voting Rights Practice Group Southern Poverty Law Center

Danger & Opportunity: An Inflection Point for Labor

The conservative legal movement has spent decades trying to weaken unions and protections for workers, with Supreme Court decisions in Janus and Cedar Point being some of the most recent and high-profile victories for the anti-union movement. At the same time, state and local governments in many jurisdictions have been at the vanguard of passing and enforcing new laws to protect and support workers, and there’s been a surge of worker organizing after years of degraded working conditions. Now, as the Supreme Court considers a case this Term, Glacier Northwest, that could permit employers to use state tort law against employees for striking, the labor movement finds itself at the crossroads.

Terri Gerstein (Moderator) Director of the State and Local Enforcement Project, Harvard Center for Labor and a Just Economy; Senior Fellow, Economic Policy Institute	Kate Andrias Patricia D. and R. Paul Yetter Professor of Law Columbia Law School
César F. Rosado Marzán Edward L. Carmody Professor of Law University of Iowa College of Law	Robert Shore Associate General Counsel Service Employees International Union
Dorian Warren Co-President, Community Change Co-Founder, Economic Security Project Co-Host, Deep Dive

4:30 – 6:00 p.m.: Plenary Session 2

We Are Not All Originalist

More than a decade after then-Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan famously declared, “[W]e are all originalists,” a conservative super-majority, made up of at least three avowed originalists, has taken control of the Supreme Court. This Court has relied on claims of originalism to achieve the aims of the conservative legal movement—including undermining reproductive rights, gun violence prevention, and the separation of church and state. Some progressives argue that if properly applied, originalism will lead to rights-expanding, progressive decisions, while critics assert that originalism is largely results-oriented and frequently abandoned by conservative justices when it cannot lead to their desired result (including through the increasing use of the so-called Shadow Docket). Faced with a Court in the thrall of originalism, what are the best avenues for lawyers, judges, and scholars to articulate and achieve a progressive vision of the Constitution?

Aziz Huq (Moderator) Frank and Bernice J. Greenberg Professor of Law University of Chicago Law School	Victoria Nourse Ralph V. Whitworth Professor of Law and Executive Director Center on Congressional Studies Georgetown University Law Center
Bijal Shah Associate Professor and Provost Faculty Fellow Boston College Law School	Elizabeth Wydra President Constitutional Accountability Center

SPONSORS Become a sponsor »

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If you have questions about sponsoring the 2023 ACS National Convention, please contact Zachary Holland, Assistant Director of Development, via email at: zholland@acslaw.org.

Scholarships

The student scholarship application is now open, and scholarships will be awarded on a rolling basis. Apply before February 15, 2023.

If you are a lawyer and have a hardship that makes the cost of attendance impossible, please contact us at LCEmails@acslaw.org.

Continuing Legal Education (CLE)

Click here to view this year’s CLE materials »

For those requesting CLE for virtual or in-person participation, you will be required to log codes announced during Convention sessions in order to verify participation and obtain credit using this form.

ACS is in the process of applying to states for CLE credit. The availability and amount of CLE credit may vary by state. So far, ACS has been approved for the following:

Approved: (In-Person Only, except California)

• California- 5 credits
• Delaware- 5 credits
• Florida- 6 credits
• Georgia- 5 credits
• Missouri- 6 credits
• New York (via reciprocity)- 5 credits
• Pennsylvania- 5 credits

Pending:

• Colorado
• North Carolina
• Texas
• Virginia

More states to come!

If you have further questions about CLE, please contact us at LCEmails@acslaw.org or FPensinger@acslaw.org.