Blog

Bread for the City’s Legal Clinic has launched a summer reading group to stay connected, especially with our summer law clerks, during these ongoing weeks of social distancing. While our work serving clients with legal advice and representation goes on despite the pandemic, ensuring access to justice throughout DC, our legal staff missed ongoing conversations with one another on related topics. Solution: connecting once a week on a social justice issue related to the law and our work. There is no shortage of issues and current events that impact our clients and community at Bread for the City. Housing and health justice, access to benefits, and issues of racial and social justice are just some of the inspirations that bring many of our legal team members to direct service work.

The COVID-19 pandemic, ensuing economic crisis, and the most recent calls for racial justice have only added to our staff’s desire to connect with one another on vital issues facing the world today. Each week, Bread for the City lawyers, paralegals, support staff, and summer law clerks will dive into topics for broader discussion through a syllabus of outlined reading.

Follow along with their reading list, below!

Week 1 Topic: Legal Education, Law Practice, and Access to Justice

Legal Education as Training for Hierarchy in 2015 (Matthew Titolo)

Lawyer Advice and Client Autonomy: Mrs. Jones’s Case (William H. Simon)

Alone in the Hallway: Challenges to Effective Self-Representation in Negotiation (Erica L. Fox)

Subordination, Rhetorical Survival Skills, and Sunday Shoes: Notes on the Hearing of Mrs. G. (Lucie E. White)

Week 2 Topic: Housing

Forced Out: The Eviction Epidemic (Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted, in The New Yorker)

Hijacking Public Housing: A Review of New Deal Ruins (Rhonda Y. Williams, Southern Spaces)

Predatory Inclusion (Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor)

The History and Evolution of Anacostia’s Barry Farm (Sara Shoenfeld, D.C. Policy Center)

Week 3 Topic: Healthcare, Care Work, and Disability

The Black American Amputation Epidemic (Lizzie Presser, ProPublica)

Introduction (Tim Faust, from Health Justice Now)

From the Archives: Beyond Economism With Nancy Fraser (The Dig Podcast)

Vivian Negron (medical receptionist) on 37 Years of Billing Private Insurance (The Death Panel podcast)

Why I Hope to Die at 75 (Ezekiel Emmanuel, The Atlantic)

Week 4 Topic: Feminism/Patriarchy/Subordination

Feminist Class Struggle (Bell Hooks, Chapter 7 of Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics)

The Combahee River Collective Statement (Combahee River Collective)

Subprime (excerpt from Laura Briggs’s How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics)

Week 5 Topic: Climate/Environmental Justice

The Racism of Climate Denial: Creating Uncertainty About Evidence Is an Injustice (Genevieve Guenther)

Green Ethics for Judges (Tom Lininger)

Between the Devil and the Green New Deal (Jasper Barnes)

Week 6 Topic: Race and Racial Justice

Beyond “Race Relations”: An Interview With Barbara J. Fields and Karen E. Fields (Daniel Denvir, Jacobin)

Black Boys and the End of Economic Opportunity (Kyle Beckham, Organizing Upgrade)

Ch. 6: Black Lives Matter: A Movement, Not a Moment (Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, in From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation)

Chocolate City (Documentary)

Week 7 Topic: Organizing and Other Change Processes

Ch.7: Liberation (Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance)

Excerpt from Introduction on organizing vs. mobilizing vs. advocacy (Jane F. McAlevey, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age)

Introduction (The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, ed. INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence)