LLS Anti-Racism Center

This photo features Dr. H. Claude Hudson '32 (center), the first African American graduate of Loyola Law School and one of the original founders of the NAACP. Dr. Hudson, born in Louisiana in 1886, earned his dental degree from Howard University and went on to obtain his law degree from LLS' evening program, while continuing his dental practice and leading the L.A. Chapter of the NAACP. Dr. Hudson's pivotal civil rights work included the desegregation of Southern California's beaches and challenges to police brutality.

Our Program

At LMU Loyola Law School (LLS), we embrace our moral and professional duty to engage, confront and dismantle individualized and structural racism, and we strive to integrate the values of anti-racism, equity and inclusion throughout our curriculum, programs and the law school community. Through the LLS Anti-Racism Center (LARC), we advance these values within and beyond the law school. LARC draws upon the multiple lawyering strategies of LLS’s diverse community members to challenge and transform legal regimes that reify structural racism and inequality. LARC connects legal scholarship and policy research, academic and policy forums, and on-the-ground clinical work to strengthen LLS’s real world impact. LARC engages LLS students as LARC Research Fellows to work with faculty on policy projects that seek to overcome white supremacy and actualize a true multi-racial democracy. LARC also hosts activist leaders of racial justice movements who educate, inform, and collaborate with faculty, staff and students, to develop community-led initiatives. By applying our collective skills, knowledge, and perspectives to initiatives defined and driven by the community, LARC takes a fundamental step toward achieving equity and democracy under the law.

LARC convenes new and existing LLS programs that further the law school’s commitment to anti-racism:

ACADEMIC & POLICY FORUMS

The new Race & Law Colloquium examines and engages cutting-edge scholarship on race, law and inequality, with weekly presentations by leading scholars of race and law. A recent installment featured colloquium founder Professor Priscilla Ocen in discussion with Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School – themselves co-authors of “Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced and Underprotected.” The colloquium will also feature presentations by advocates and policymakers who prioritize racial justice in their work.

The Policing Los Angeles Forum debuted in February 2018 and has focused on the inordinate impact of law-enforcement procedures on communities of color. It has included the panels “Promoting De-Escalation Training,” “Policing Under SB54,” “Police Policy Making,” “Police Body Cameras” and many more. Archives of past panels are available at www.lls.edu/policing. Its leadership -- Sean Kennedy, Kaplan & Feldman Executive Director of the CJLP, and Professor Eric Miller, Leo J. O’Brien Fellow – collaborate to bring together theory, research and practice to apply a racial justice lens to law enforcement practices and policies.

ACADEMIC RESEARCH & POLICY INNOVATION

LARC provides a platform for dialogue and research to generate policy proposals that address and seek to overcome systemic issues in law and policy that sustain white supremacy. These faculty-led policy projects include Democratizing Justice, the Reparations Project and the Thirteenth Amendment Initiative. LLS students may be selected to collaborate with faculty on these projects as LARC Research Fellows. LARC also supports activists in residence to educate, inform and collaborate with faculty, staff and students on LARC-affiliated projects.

CLINICAL OFFERINGS

The Loyola Social Justice Law Clinic’s robust clinical offerings have a legacy of challenging and transforming legal systems that subordinate people of color and other client populations marginalized due to immigration status, disability, age, gender, gender identity, sexuality, religion, national origin and socioeconomic status. LSJLC is committed to increasing opportunities for LLS students to lawyer for racial and social justice.

LARC amplifies and expands LSJLC’s anti-racism advocacy. The Sony Social Justice Fund has made a significant gift to LSJLC’s Collateral Consequences of Conviction Justice Project, a clinic that since 2017 has trained 52 law students to provide re-entry legal services to reduce the marginalizing effects of conviction on those formerly incarcerated and the communities in which they live. The gift sustains CCCJP’s advocacy against overpolicing, oversentencing and overincarceration of people of color and CCCJP’s work to strengthen communities that have been disproportionately impacted by these policies