Around the world, people are facing the global climate crisis, the COVID pandemic, worsening poverty and wealth concentration, war, and other crisis conditions produced by long arcs of colonialism and racial capitalism. We are often told that the answers to our problems like in “rule of law” and constitutionalism. Yet, widespread movements for justice seem to be calling for something else, asking us to imagine a world without prisons, police, borders, and poverty. In this talk, law professor and abolitionist activist Dean Spade will address how contemporary movements’ critiques of law and law reform invite us to rethink how social change happens and what roles legislatures, courts, elected officials and other legal structures have in the transformative change we seek and need.

Dean Spade is an associate professor at the Seattle University School of Law. Dean has been working to build queer and trans liberation based in racial and economic justice for the past two decades. He’s the author of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law, the director of the documentary “Pinkwashing Exposed: Seattle Fights Back!,” and the creator of the mutual aid toolkit at BigDoorBrigade.com. His latest book, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next), was published by Verso Press in October 2020.