NLG Member, Rashida Tlaib is the 2026 #Law4ThePeople Convention Keynote Speaker!
Rashida Tlaib is an unbossed and unbought Congresswoman and, in her own words, “a mother working for justice for all.” Her two young sons are at the root of her unwavering passion to help change lives for the better. She is the oldest of 14 children, born and raised in Detroit, the proud daughter of Palestinian immigrant parents.
Rashida made history in 2008 by becoming the first Muslim woman to ever serve in the Michigan Legislature. She is beloved by residents for the transformative constituent services she provides, and for successfully fighting the billionaires and corporations that pollute her district. When families get to know Rashida, they have no doubt that she will work tirelessly to knock down barriers for real change, and whether by policy or action, she will roll up her sleeves to make sure her residents are cared for, no matter how big the challenge.
When billionaire slumlord Matty Moroun refused to follow the law and get polluting semi-trucks off neighborhood streets, Rashida organized residents with the We Have A Right To Breathe campaign and forced Moroun to fulfill his obligations to protecting public health. When large piles of black dust started showing up on the Detroit riverfront and blowing into homes and parks, and the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality told residents everything was fine, Rashida collected samples and got the substance tested herself – exposing the cancer-causing “petroleum coke” as a threat, and getting it removed.
As an attorney at the Sugar Law Center for Economic and Social Justice, Rashida took the movement to the courts, fighting racist emergency managers, abusive state agencies, and leading the fight for community benefits agreements that promote equitable development. Rashida knows that effective advocacy requires an all-out approach, fighting in the community, in the legislature, and in the courts every day against injustice and inequality, so that every single person in this country has a chance to thrive.
Katherine Franke – Law for the People Award
Katherine Franke is the James L. Dohr Professor of Law (retired) at Columbia University,
where she served on the law faculty for 25 years, and where she also founded and directed the Center for Gender & Sexuality Law. She served on the Executive Committees of Columbia’s Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender, and the Center for Palestine
Studies. She also led a research team that documented Columbia Law School’s relationship to slavery and its legacies. She is among the nation’s leading scholars writing on law, sexuality race, and religion drawing from feminist, queer, and critical race theory.
Professor Franke currently serves on the Advisory Board of Palestine Legal, the steering
committee of the Academic Advisory Council of Jewish Voice for Peace, the Board of the
Solidaire Network, the editorial board of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, and on the Advisory Board of Columbia University’s Center for Justice. Prior to 2018, before she was permanently banned from entering the state of Israel, she served as an academic
mentor for the human rights faculty at Al Quds University in East Jerusalem. She was also
the National Director of the National Lawyers Guild from 1990-1991.
Her first book, Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality (NYU Press 2015), considers the costs of winning marriage rights for same sex couples today and for African Americans at the end of the Civil War. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011 to undertake research for Wedlocked. Her second book, Repair: Redeeming the Promise of Slavery’s Abolition (Haymarket Press 2019), makes the case for racial reparations in the United States by returning to a time at the end of slavery when many formerly enslaved people were provided land explicitly as a form of reparation, yet after President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated the land was stolen back from freed people and given to former slave owners.
Marc Van Der Hout – Ernie & Bill Goodman Award
Marc Van Der Hout is the founder of Van Der Hout LLP, a firm recognized nationally for its litigation and advocacy on cutting-edge issues. A California State Bar Certified Specialist in Immigration and Nationality Law, Marc has been recognized by bar associations throughout the country for his innovative and resourceful representation of immigrants. He has twice received the Carol Weiss King Award of the National Immigration Project for outstanding immigration litigation and twice the American Immigration Lawyers Association premier award for outstanding litigation in the field of immigration law. Marc was national president of the National Lawyers Guild in 1985-86 and is a past board chair of the National Immigration Project.
Marc Van Der Hout, is a practicing attorney and the founding member of Van Der Hout, LLP. He is a California State Bar Certified Specialist in Immigration and Nationality Law. Founded in 1980, Van Der Hout, LLP, is a nationally-recognized, full-service immigration law firm representing individuals, families, and companies in the San Francisco Bay Area and throughout California. Their clients come from across the country and across the globe and their cases cover a broad range of immigration litigation and visa concerns.
Mr. Van Der Hout has been recognized by bar associations throughout the country for his innovative and resourceful representation of immigrants. He has twice received the American Immigration Lawyers Association premier award for outstanding litigation in the field of immigration law and twice received the Carol Weiss King Award of the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers’ Guild for outstanding immigration litigation. Among his many other awards, Mr. Van Der Hout was selected by the San Francisco Chronicle in 2003 as one of San Francisco’s top 25 attorneys; was named by the Los Angeles Daily Journal as one of California’s Top 100 Lawyers in 2007; received a 2008 Attorney of the Year Clay award from California Lawyer Magazine for outstanding achievement in his field and that same year was named one of the top 100 lawyers in Northern California by Super Lawyers Magazine; received the San Francisco Lawyers’ Committee Robert G. Sproul Award for Outstanding Pro Bono Services in the Legal Field in 2009 and has been named by Woodward/White’s Best Lawyers in America every year since 1993.
Mr. Van Der Hout attended the University of Michigan, where he received his Bachelor of Arts in Sociology in 1970. He then went on to Golden Gate University School of Law, where he earned his Juris Doctorate (JD) in 1977. He was national president of the National Lawyers Guild in 1985-86. Currently, Mr. Van Der Hout is an active member of the Board of Governors of the American Immigration Lawyers’ Association (AILA) and has served on its Board every year since 1989. He is a past chair of the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild and has served on its governing board for the past 38 years. Mr. Van Der Hout has lectured extensively on the subject of immigration law throughout the country and has served as an adjunct professor at both Hastings College of the Law and Berkeley School of Law.
Matthew McLoughlin – Karen Jo Koonan Award
Matthew McLoughlin is an activist and legal worker. Cutting his teeth as an organizer with Occupy Chicago, Matt has continued to organize around key issues in Chicago including public school closures, immigrant rights, and racial justice. For the past 14 years, he has helped lift up, document, and support local and national movements to end mass incarceration, including organizing jail support and solidarity actions.
For the last decade, Matt has worked on ending money bond and reducing pretrial jailing in Illinois. In 2015, he co-founded the Chicago Community Bond Fund. During his time at the Bond Fund, Matt led the process of establishing the intake hotline response and post-release support systems as well as playing an essential role in the campaign to abolish money bond. In 2021, Matt helped lead efforts with the Illinois Network for Pretrial Justice to pass the Pretrial Fairness Act, legislation that made Illinois the first state in the country to end wealth-based jailing. He currently serves as the Network’s Campaign Coordinator and has spent the last several years working on implementing the Pretrial Fairness Act, ending the Cook County Sheriff’s Electronic Monitoring Program, and passing two more related pieces of legislation that funded voluntary services for people awaiting trial and will create Illinois’s first statewide public defender for trial-level representation.
Since 2016, Matt has also served as NLG Chicago’s Mass Defense Coordinator. During the 2014-2016 Black Lives Matter movement, 2020 George Floyd Uprisings, protests of the genocide in Palestine, and Trump’s recent attack on Chicago’s immigrant communities, Matt coordinated Chicago chapter members to provide legal support for the movement, including facilitating representation for more than 1,500 people arrested at protests. In 2024, Matt coordinated legal support for protests of both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. Two years ago, he stepped into the Chicago chapter’s Director of Operations role, and last year became the NLG Legal Worker Vice President.
Samantha Santoro – C.B. King Award
Samantha Santoro (they/she) is from Toronto, Canada. Samantha worked in the areas of racial and disability justice before law school, most recently at the National Association of Friendship Centres as a Project Coordinator working on the Decent Work for Youth: Urban Indigenous Youth Leadership Development project. During their 1L summer, Samantha split their time at Make the Road NY (MRNY) in their Immigration Unit and Community Justice Project Miami (CJP). Their work with MRNY demonstrated the connection between the criminal punishment system and the immigrant detention and deportation system and at CJP, their work involved doing legal advocacy and client interviewing with families experiencing mass evictions in Black and Latine communities in South Florida.
As a Wilf Scholar at NYU Law, they are active in the areas of immigrant justice, youth defense, disability and racial justice, and prison abolition. They’re an active member of NYU NLG. They have interned with the Neighbourhood Defender Services’ Immigration Defense Practice, supporting immigrants experiencing immigration consequences as a result of interactions with the criminal legal system, and the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights, supporting with all facets of their holistic youth defense work impacting young people in Louisiana. Throughout law school, they’ve represented incarcerated people in their Tier III disciplinary hearings through the Solitary Confinement Project and young people in their suspension hearings through the Suspension Representation Project. Samantha always sees their work as attempting to materially work towards people’s freedom and wants to divert as many people as possible from the criminal legal system while working towards the abolition of all carceral and colonial logics and systems, from Turtle Island to Palestine and beyond. This summer, Samantha will be interning with the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project in Phoenix, Arizona, on the Adult Program – Detention Action & Response Team.
Suzanne Adely – Debra Evenson “Venceremos” Award
Suzanne is a past and current interim president of the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) and a member of the Bureau of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL), where she also serves as an alternate delegate to the United Nations. She has been one of the co-chairs of the NLG’s International Committee for many years, where she has worked to use the law to expose and build accountability for the U.S. Imperialist policies.
Suzanne has led and participated in several human rights delegations to Egypt, Palestine, Cuba, Venezuela, the Philippines, and elsewhere. She has also served as a juror and prosecutor for people’s tribunals covering the use of Sanctions, Economic Blockades, and Economic Coercive Measures around the world, Ecocide as part of the Genocide in Palestine, and on Human Rights in the Philippines, and other issues.
Suzanne is the daughter of Arab immigrant workers, a former public school teacher, and a long-time Arab community organizer, with a background in international labor organizing and global human rights. For eight years she worked with the Food Chain Workers Alliance (FCWA), a movement of over 35 worker-based organizations focused on building the infrastructure of the food worker movement, to increase organized worker density in the food economy while advancing broader movements for justice. Suzanne is a member of the National Coordinating Committee of the U.S. Palestinian Community Network and a co-convener of Labor for Palestine and a 2025-2026 Castenea Fellow, for leaders of color in the food system.
