Out of respect for the graduate student strike, we are cancelling this event for now, and we look forward to rescheduling it after the issues that prompted the strike have been resolved.
The Columbia Law School Mindfulness Program invites you to a special evening meditation and discussion on Tuesday, March 23, 7-8:30 pm EDT, on "The Practice of Restorative Justice and Mindful Listening" featuring sujatha baliga and hosted by Professors Jocelyn Simonson and Elizabeth Emens (bios below).
sujatha baliga, a long time practitioner of both meditation and restorative justice, will share her learning about the value of unconditionally listening to crime survivors and people who've caused harm. As part of the event, sujatha will answer questions and offer experiential practices on how to offer and receive compassionate, steadfast presence in the face of our own and others' suffering.
To register for the event, please follow this link.
sujatha baliga’s work is characterized by an equal dedication to crime survivors and people who’ve caused harm. A former victim advocate and public defender, sujatha is a frequent guest lecturer at universities and conferences about her decades of restorative justice work. She also speaks publicly and inside prisons about her own experiences as a survivor of child sexual abuse and her path to forgiveness. Her personal and research interests include the forgiveness of seemingly unforgivable acts, survivor-led movements, restorative justice’s potential impact on racial disparities in our justice system, and Buddhist notions of conflict transformation. A longtime Buddhist practitioner, she leads meditation at The Gyuto Foundation in Richmond, CA. She was named a 2019 MacArthur Fellow.
Alexis Hoag is the inaugural Practitioner-in-Residence at the Eric H. Holder, Jr., Initiative for Civil & Political Rights at Columbia University, and a lecturer at Columbia Law School, where she teaches courses in abolition, capital post-conviction defense, and movement lawyering. This summer she will join the faculty at Brooklyn Law School as an Assistant Professor. Hoag’s scholarship examines the laws, institutions, and jurisprudence that perpetuate the subordination of Black people within the criminal legal system and suggests avenues for change, including carceral abolition. Hoag maintains a limited capital defense practice and continues to consult on death penalty cases around the country. Prior to academia, Hoag served as Senior Counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (“LDF”), where she represented clients in a variety of civil and criminal matters. She has authored amicus curie briefs before the U.S. Supreme Court and state supreme courts on behalf of capitally convicted individuals. Hoag also served eight years as an Assistant Federal Public Defender in Nashville, TN, where she represented death-sentenced individuals in federal habeas and related state court proceedings. She clerked for Judge John T. Nixon of the United State District Court. Hoag graduated from Yale College and NYU Law.
Jocelyn Simonson is a Visiting Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and a Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School. She writes and teaches about criminal law, criminal procedure, evidence, and social change, with a particular interest in how abolitionist social movements use communal tactics of resistance to push back against the violence of the carceral state.
Elizabeth Emens is Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, where she is Director of the Mindfulness Program and Co-Chair of the Davis Polk Leadership Initiative. In 2013 she co-edited, with Prof. Michael Ashley Stein, Disability and Equality Law (Ashgate Press), and in 2019, she published her first book, The Art of Life Admin (Viking & HoughtonMifflin Harcourt, 2019). She earned her B.A. and J.D. from Yale University and her Ph.D. from King’s College, Cambridge. Most recently, she has been writing about disability discrimination, law, and mindfulness.
