Advancing Justice After a Pandemic — The 2021 Access to Justice Conference Provides a Learning Opportunity
Washington’s 2021 Access to Justice Conference, Crisis and Reckoning: A Call to Dismantle Unjust Systems, was presented virtually due to the COVID pandemic. This has a silver lining for those who were unable to attend, as the Access to Justice Board has posted the video recordings from the biennial conference on their YouTube channel. TVW has also aired several of the presentations. The inequities in our state, especially those experienced by communities of color, and the innovative and determined response by civil legal service attorneys and public defenders to the inequities further laid bare in the COVID era make this conference required viewing for all attorneys who care about improving justice in Washington.
The conference began with opening remarks from Chief Justice Steven González, a former chair of the Access to Justice Board. He noted, “In my view, creating the ATJ Board is one of the best things my Court has ever done. Because of you, Washington is recognized nationwide and beyond as a leader in the access to justice movement and I want us to stay in front.” But he also challenged attendees to take actions to make access to justice more of a reality, including offering weekend and evening office hours. He explains:
Justice is equity not equality. What we require now is bold action to address the ills we face. Change for all of is hard. It is risky and it is uncomfortable. Yet not as hard, risky, or uncomfortable as the status quo is for those without power and without access. I ask us to reach, to make ourselves uncomfortable instead of congratulating ourselves for the good we have undoubtedly already done in our lives.…Though I’m proud of who we are and what we have accomplished, I’m not satisfied. We must be selfless in this selfish age. Sometimes it means stepping aside; choosing another to lead. It means giving up power and comfort. It may mean listening instead of talking or acting instead of criticizing.
The many speakers in the conference did exactly that — challenging public interest lawyers to press forward and not rest on their laurels.
Gabriel Galanda, an attorney who specializes in protecting indigenous human rights, followed Chief Justice González, and gave a deeply thoughtful and challenging land acknowledgment, noting that he was speaking from the ancestral lands of the Duwamish people and then noting that “you are most certainly Zooming in from indigenous land”:
I urge you to do your own homework regarding the indigenous origins of the lands upon which you live and work. Do the research. Visit those lands and waters. Develop or renew kinship with your indigenous neighbors. In other words, do the work. Do the work to truly acknowledge ancestral indigenous land occupation and modern indigenous existence and survival. Then, consistent with the theme of this conference, act. Do something to improve, or help improve, indigenous life today. Life that is generally afflicted by the highest rates of pain, suffering, and injustice in our society. Otherwise indigenous land acknowledgement, like we now witness all the time, is performative and perfunctory.
He proceeded to present a historical roadmap of why and how indigenous people have been deprived of legal recourse to constitutional rights after having been forced into treaties, forced into the Western concepts of tribes and nations, forced off their ancestral lands, and then systematically preyed upon. He explained that the “United State Constitution and its Bill of Rights generally does not protect indigenous persons while on their remaining homeland” due to Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez, a 1978 opinion written by Justice Thurgood Marshall that held tribal sovereignty and corresponding sovereign immunity precluded an equal protection claim against the tribe’s rule that children of Santa Clara women, but not Santa Clara men, who married non-tribal members were ineligible for tribal membership.
Speaker panels included a plenary panel with Washington lawmakers Senator Rebecca Saldaña and Representatives Kirsten Harris-Talley, Jamila Taylor, and Tara Simmons discussing Washington’s response to the COVID-19 crisis and the impact on the justice system. TVW also aired another plenary panel focused on the intersection of disability and race, featuring Justice G. Helen Whitener, Judge Veronica Galván, Carrie Basas of the Governor’s Office of the Education Ombuds, and Leah Salerno of Disability Rights Washington.
One of the most inspiring speakers was Michele Storms, Executive Director of the ACLU of Washington, whose keynote Justice Begins at Home: Finding the Strength and Care We Need to Fight Injustice in our World brought both hope and caution with a message to draw on personal experience as fuel for the fight:
So many of my relatives needed what I and all of you have dedicated our lives to — inclusion under the law, access to the things a person needs to survive, and all the guarantees of the Constitution. We’re still here fighting because it’s not true yet….Justice? Not yet….We are fighting for beautiful worthy persons to live with freedom and dignity….The injustice plaguing our country has its roots in the individual and collective actions of many and it cannot be addressed without the individual and collective actions of all of us. Because many of us have spent much of our lives, however young or old we may be, as part of a small band of equity and justice anti-oppression advocates, there’s something almost surreal about having much of society rise up to join in under the leadership of Black Lives Matter and other community-led movement leaders. What has happened is that we are now offered an unprecedented disruptive moment in which we can leverage all that we’ve learned so far in the course of our equity and justice efforts. We have a great opportunity for change.
As you seek to bring change and promote justice, take a few hours and watch the conference. You will be inspired and challenged. (RM)
