The LSU Law Center and Ogden Honors College will host a speaker series titled “Reverberations” on local acts and global impacts. The series consists of three discussions, beginning March 29, at the LSU Law Center and the French House Grand Salon.
The series schedule and speakers are listed below:
Past Due: Costs and Consequences of Charging for Justice
Mathilde Laisne (Vera Institute) and Jennifer Hull (Orleans Public Defenders)
Wednesday, March 29, 2017; 3:30 PM
LSU Law Center, Room 106
Every year, government agencies in New Orleans collect millions of dollars in the form of bail, fines and fees from people involved in the criminal justice system and, by extension, from their families. Millions more are transferred from the pockets and bank accounts of residents to for-profit bail bond agents. Some view these costs as a necessary way to offset the expense of operating the criminal justice system. But because many “users” of the system have very low incomes or none at all, there is growing concern that charging for justice amounts to a criminalization of poverty.
Join us for a conversation on the cost and function of criminal justice in Louisiana featuring Jennifer Hull, a felony trial attorney at the Orleans Public Defender’s Office and Mathilde Laisne, a senior program associate at the Vera Institute for Justice.
This program is part of a joint project of the LSU Law Center and the Ogden Honors College and was curated and organized with BUREAU of CHANGE, an education-centric digital media studio in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Speaker Biographies:
Mathilde Laisne is a senior program associate with the Vera Institute of Justice’s New Orleans office where she works with local partners to develop initiatives that improve fairness and efficiency in the city’s criminal justice system. In 2017, she co-authored a report that looks at the use of bail, fines and fees in New Orleans and the resulting incarceration and costs. Mathilde holds a masters in international security from the Paris School of International Affairs with a concentration in human rights law. Prior to that, she studied political science at the University of Sciences Po in Paris and sociology at the Humboldt University of Berlin. While in school, Mathilde interned with the Office of the Prosecutor at the Special Tribunal for Lebanon in The Hague, Netherlands.
Jennifer Hull is an attorney in the trials division of the Orleans Public Defender’s Office (OPD), where she represents indigent clients who are charged with felony crimes. Prior to working for OPD, Jennifer worked for Southeast Louisiana Legal Services, a 503(c) non-profit, providing legal representation to indigent clients in civil matters. There, she worked predominately in the domestic unit, litigating family law, child in need of care and domestic violence matters. Jennifer graduated from LSU Law in 2011. While at the law center, she worked as a student practitioner in the Immigration and Juvenile Criminal Defense Clinics, served as the Pro Bono Chair of the Public Interest Law Society and was the recipient of the Ginger Berrigan Award.
Anguish, Rage, and Mercy
Kevin Sack, New York Times
Monday, April 3, 2017; 3:30 PM
LSU Law Center Auditorium
“In an extraordinary culmination to the federal death penalty trial of Dylann S. Roof, 35 family members and friends of his nine African-American victims confronted him directly at a sentencing hearing on Wednesday. Some forgave him with Christian grace. Others damned him to hell. But almost all proclaimed defiantly that his murderous church rampage had failed in its mission to sow division and racist hate.” Kevin Sack, “Anguish, Rage and Mercy as Dylann Roof Is Sentenced to Death,” New York Times, January 11, 2017.
Join us for a lecture and conversation with Kevin Sack, who covered the trial of Dylann Roof for the New York Times, about the interaction of community and legal process in the aftermath of racist violence at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
This program is part of a joint project of the LSU Law Center and the Ogden Honors College and was curated and organized with BUREAU of CHANGE, an education-centric digital media studio in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Speaker Biography:
Kevin Sack is a senior writer, based in Atlanta, who produces long-form narrative projects for the investigations team. He has written broadly about national affairs for more than three decades and has shared in three Pulitzer Prizes.
During more than 20 years with The Times, he has served as bureau chief in Atlanta and Albany, covered health care for the national desk, and reported extensively on race, the South and domestic politics. His interests over the years have ranged widely, from kidney transplantation to the assimilation of refugees to the intersection of race and faith. A native of Jacksonville, Fla., he is an honors history graduate of Duke University.
It’s amazing we don’t have more fights
Chloë Bass, Artist and Public Practitioner
Friday, April 7, 2017, 11:00 AM
Ogden Honors College, French House Grand Salon
This workshop investigates appropriate social distances within the context of institutional behavior. Schools and courtrooms are sites of both formality and great intimacy between people and their colleagues. As we navigate our personal, pedagogical or professional desires, we are often swept up in crowd management, or guided through procedures by structured choreographies. Inspired by the sociological field of proxemics (the spatial requirements of human beings and the effects of these requirements on society), Chloë Bass will bring participants together to turn distance into story, and teach new ways to read a room. Expect some engagements of intimacy, some instances of performance, and some participatory writing. Measuring devices and other materials will be provided; the systems we design to use them will be all yours.
The workshop is part of the fourth chapter of The Book of Everyday Instruction, Bass’ ongoing project about one-on-one social interaction. Chapter Four is focused on the accidental and incidental choreographies created by engaging with other bodies in space. The chapter’s title (“It’s amazing we don’t have more fights”) is a paraphrase of a quote from the artist’s mother about successful social behavior on New York’s subways and buses.
This program is part of a joint project of the LSU Law Center and the Ogden Honors College curated and organized with BUREAU of CHANGE an education-centric digital media studio in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Speaker Biography:
Chloë Bass is a conceptual artist working in performance, situation, publication, and installation. Her work addresses scales of intimacy, where patterns hold and break as group sizes expand, and daily life as a site of deep research. Her current project, The Book of Everyday Instruction, is an eight-chapter investigation into one-on-one social interaction. Chloë is a 2017 – 2018 Workspace resident at the Center for Book Arts, and a 2017 studio resident at Triangle Arts Association. Her projects have appeared in recent exhibitions at CUE Art Foundation, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Project Space, The Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, the James Gallery, and elsewhere. Her forthcoming book will be published by the Operating System in December 2017; her writing is most often found on Hyperallergic. She is an Assistant Professor in Art and Social Practice at Queens College, CUNY.
