Teaching Criminal Law a Decade into the Movement for Black Lives

After George Zimmerman was acquitted of the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2013, three women, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, created, in their words, “a Black-centered, political-movement-building project called #BlackLivesMatter.” Just over a decade later, this movement has grown into a powerful, decentralized coalition catalyzed by the protest actions following the deaths of Ferguson teen Michael Brown and New Yorker Eric Garner at the hands of police officers and by the worldwide response to police violence following George Floyd's choking death by Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis. This edition of Perspectives is an effort to take stock of how these events and attendant social movements have inspired change in criminal justice research, policy, and law. In particular, we were interested in how the past decade's events have influenced how we teach. We asked noted Yale Law School scholar and professor, James Forman, author of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize winning book Locking Up Our Own : Crime and Punishment in Black America , to select a group for and to guide a conversation on this topic. Professor Forman is joined by Bennett Capers (Fordham School of Law), Angela Davis (American University Washington College of Law), Erin Murphy (NYU School of Law), and Shaun Ossei-Owusu (University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School).