“And when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid
So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive.”
Audre Lorde, A Litany for Survival
This issue of the National Lawyers Guild Review (NLGR) represents a significant moment in its history, marking an abundant past and hopeful future in terms of scope and impact. The current publication also represents dual, yet intersecting visions. It seems apropos that the current significant pivotal moment in politics and movement also align with the juncture of NLGR leadership changes. As the new Editor in Chief, I will maintain the rich scholarly tradition of the NLGR, while stabilizing, aligning, and broadening the scope of its work. To evolve, despite our fear, as Lorde says, we must give a present voice to our vision. In many ways, this iteration of the NLGR represents an oasis of dialectic discussion for tender hearts that yearn for liberation. That said, I am grateful to my predecessor Dalia Fuleihan for her leadership in advancing the structure of the NLGR, the consistent publication of materials, and excellent work. I am also grateful for the skilled leadership of current NLGR Executive Editor Michael Drake.
I suspect the content of the NLGR will convey far more than I could ever state about myself. As an introduction, I am a constitutional lawyer primarily focusing on the rights and post-conviction remedies for prisoners, particularly political prisoners using a holistically informed movement approach to the work. I spent time during my legal career teaching and mentoring law students with the same skills. Yet in my time in the legal profession, strewn with documents, text, motion practice, intellectual rigor, and lofty ideas, I have learned that the marrow of the work often involves and is moved by a shared human language, typically unspoken, the symbolic, and the sacred. In this manner, the NLGR represents individual and collective understanding of liberation in technicolor. Within this same vein, the visual artistic work of Layout Editor, Olive Gardenia, adorn the pages of the current and future issues of NLGR. The addition of Zane McNeil to the current executive editorial board staff also presents profound scholarship and creative insight.
A scene from Kushner’s Angels in America:
Roy Cohn : [under the impression that Belize is the Angel of Death] Can I ask you something, sir?
Belize : [going along with it] “Sir”?
Roy Cohn : What’s it like? After?
Belize : After…?
Roy Cohn : This misery ends?
Belize : Hell or heaven?
Roy Cohn : …heh…
Belize : Like San Francisco.
Roy Cohn : A city! Good! I was worried… it’d be a garden. I hate that shit.
Belize : Mmmm. Big city. Overgrown with weeds, but flowering weeds. On every corner a wrecking crew and
something new and crooked going up catty corner to that. Windows missing in every edifice like broken teeth,
gritty wind, and a gray high sky full of ravens.
Roy Cohn : Isaiah.
Belize : Prophet birds, Roy. Piles of trash, but lapidary like rubies and obsidian, and diamond-colored cowspit
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Editors Preface 2024
streamers in the wind. And voting booths. And everyone in Balenciaga gowns with red corsages, and big dance
palaces full of music and lights and racial impurity and gender confusion. And all the deities are creole, mulatto,
brown as the mouths of rivers. Race, taste and history finally overcome. And you ain’t there.
Roy Cohn : And Heaven?
Belize : That was Heaven, Roy.
Belize’s prophetic and elegiac vision of abolition, of dismantling systems are a reclamation of “history finally overcome.” So too of the NLGR: vision with ultimate objective of liberation is our compass. We seek to create a compendium of our movements, politics, and legal developments to move beyond mere conceptualization, and lean into the mystery of not knowing the ultimate meaning but for the passage of time. We endeavor to quench and nourish our thirst for meaning.
Thus, the NLGR reader can expect it to advance the professional identity formation and continuing legal education of National Lawyers Guild members by advancing scholarship, political education, and illuminating interdisciplinary intersections with the law, such as with arts and culture. The NLGR will tastefully bear cultural and artistic expression within the written legal scholarship the publication will offer. Where appropriate, visual art and music accompany each issue as a companion to synthesize and integrate our intellectual understanding of its content. I am grateful and look forward to this journey with you.
In Solidarity and Revolutionary Love,
Jenipher R. Jones, Esq.
Editor in Chief
National Lawyers Guild Review