CLE Registration: Protecting Our Future – Defend Voting Rights and Mitigate Climate Change
NLG International Committee CLE 2018: Protecting Our Future – Defend Voting Rights and Mitigate Climate Change
This CLE will take place on Thursday, November 1 from 1:00 pm to 5:00 pm at the NLG Law for the People Convention in Portland, Oregon (at the Benson Hotel,309 SW Broadway, Portland, OR 97205) . NLG Convention participants, non-participants and all interested lawyers, legal workers and law students are welcome to join.
Join the National Lawyers’ Guild International Committee for this informative and incisive CLE program in which active practitioners will present on two major human rights issues and the application of international law in the United States.
This CLE will discuss practical uses of international human rights law for confronting two pressing issues: Mitigating Climate Change and Defending the Right to Vote. Participants will learn about relevant UN treaties and Inter-American declarations and how they are being incorporated into litigation at State, Federal and International forums. Particular emphasis on recent precedents, legal cases and findings as well as creative use of Amicus curae and Expert testimonies in select ongoing cases; highlighting the Oregon case of Juliana vs US, and other Climate Justice cases being heard in EU as well as important ongoing litigation in the US challenging voter suppression.
- CLE faculty will address the massive attack on voting rights across the United States. Across the country, massive voter purges are stripping thousands from the rolls, and this is having a vastly disproportionate effect on Black communities and other communities of color, particularly working-class people. How can we fight effectively to defend the right to vote? Practitioners will discuss domestic and international law strategies in use in cases across the country.
- CLE faculty will also address the rights of the earth and children, under attack even more as environmental protections are rolled back in support of corporate interests even as climate change poses a severe threat to the future. Around the world, climate change under capitalism is producing mass displacement and poverty. Children and youth have filed a lawsuit, Juliana v. United States, alleging that unchecked climate change violates the rights of children.
The CLE will include active examples of the use of international law in relevant contexts to defend human rights in the United States.
Register online:
- CLE Registration for those earning over $50,000/yr – $50:
- CLE Registration for those earning $35-50,000/yr – $25:
- CLE Registration for those earning under $35,000/yr – $15 :
- CLE Registration for those who are unemployed or have no income is free. Please email international@nlg.org and we will register you!
Click here for your total check-out:
CLE Faculty will be:
Jeanne Mirer, Attorney and Co-Chair of the NLG International Committee. She is currently President of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, a founding Board Member of the International Commission for Labor Rights and a Board Member of the Sugar Law Center. Additionally, Jeanne is a member of the Core and the National Board of the Vietnam Agent Orange Relief & Responsibility Campaign. She has been a member of the NLG for 42 years and has held numerous positions in the Guild. She practices labor, employment and civil rights law in New York City. Among her clients are Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange who have taken to court the U.S. chemical companies that profited from manufacturing the poison. In addition to the Guild and the IADL, she is a member of the AFL-CIO Lawyers Coordinating Committee, the National Employment Law Association, and the NAACP. Jeanne has a deep and extensive history of work in both the international and domestic sphere, including the application of international laws, standards and treaties to the United States. She has authored and co-authored countless white papers, briefs, and articles on everything from the human right to peace, to Agent Orange, to drones, to women’s rights, to labor law and international law. She is admitted to practice law in New York, Massachussetts, and Michigan.
Greg Palast, investigative journalist and filmmaker, is currently investigating the violation of voting rights across the United States. Beginning in the 1970s, having earned his degree in finance at the University of Chicago studying under Milton Friedman and free-trade luminaries, Palast went on to challenge their vision of a New Global Order, working for the United Steelworkers of America, the Enron workers’ coalition in Latin America and consumer and environmental groups worldwide. Palast is Patron of the Trinity College Philosophical Society, an honor previously held by Jonathan Swift and Oscar Wilde. His writings have won him the Financial Times David Thomas Prize.
Martha L. Schmidt, Employment/Labor Attorney and Educator based in Seattle, was a chair of the NLG former Peace and Disarmament Subcommittee and RVP for the Northwest Region. She served several terms as chair of the World Peace Through Law Section of the Washington State Bar Association and has worked for more than a decade with the human right to health movement. She was a union organizer and educator for service sector unions and the King County Labor Council, AFL-CIO. Since the 1990s, she has taught in undergraduate liberal arts and graduate public policy programs at public universities in Washington State. Curricular areas have included international human rights, political economy, international relations of Latin America and the Caribbean, labor policy and law, race, class and gender studies, and sociology of social movements. Schmidt has a certificat in international human rights law from L’Institut International des Droits de l’Homme in Strasbourg and interned at the London secretariat of Amnesty International, working on the death penalty. She earned an LL.M. at University of Washington Law School (Law and Marine Affairs), J.D. at Wisconsin Law School and Master of International Administration from the School for International Training.
