Speaking at American Association of Law Teachers

Panel: Critical Leadership, Accountability, and Justice Within Organizations.

I’m honored to join the 2023 Association of American Law Schools Annual Meeting to present on the Civil Rights and Minority Groups Joint Program: Panel: Critical Leadership, Accountability, and Justice Within Organizations.

The Panel topic:

Lawyers and the organizations that they help to lead have a duty to care for justice.  This duty is not only important to accomplish justice, but also to validate and enhance the legitimacy of the organization, the lawyer, and the legal profession more broadly.  Among other actions, the duty to care for justice requires that lawyers work within their organizations to address and demonstrate progress toward resolving social inequities, including challenges to access, equity, equal protection and non-discrimination, responsible innovation and use of advanced technologies, and the just representation of diverse constituencies.

What does it mean to be a lawyer working for justice inside government or a private sector organization?  How can lawyers leverage their organizational power and capabilities in the name of justice?  What can lawyers do to ensure that their institutions are held accountable for authentic and not merely performative advancements toward justice?

Moderator: Thalia González

Professor of Law and Harry & Lillian Hastings Research Chair, Co-Director of the Center for Racial and Economic Justice

Panelist Bijal Shah

Associate professor and Provost Faculty Fellow at the Boston College Law School

Richard Wallsgrove

Co-Director, Environmental Law Program, Assistant Professor of Law at the William S. Richardson School of Law at the University of Hawaii at Manoa

John Towers Rice

Assistant Professor of Law at Lincoln Memorial University

Maurice Dyson – Suffolk

Professor of Law at Suffolk University

My talk on the panel is entitled “Cannabis Regulation: The Real Need for New Social Equity Approaches.”

The discussion will revolve around my work-in-progress, We(ed) the People of Cannabis, in Order to Form a More Equitable Industry: A Theory for Imagining New Social Equity Approaches to Cannabis Regulation.

Brief Synopsis:

States increasingly implement “social equity” programs as an element of new cannabis regulations; however, these programs routinely fail to achieve their goals and frequently exacerbate the inequities they purport to solve, leaving inequitable industries, high incarceration rates, and broken communities in their wake. This ineffectiveness is due to the industry’s fundamental confusion of the modern, individualized concept of “equity” with the historical, society-level concept of “social equity.” I develop a new theory of “cannabis social equity” to integrate these concepts, and I apply that theory, first, to diagnose why current policies fall short and, second, to propose a new approach to social equity that can remedy the inequities in both the emerging industry and in the populations most adversely affected by the War on Drugs.

Legislators, regulators, advocates, and scholars built the modern definition of social equity by replacing the rich, process-based theories of racial, social, and restorative justice with a narrow set of policies crafted more for narrative resonance than effectiveness. These policies variously fail to improve equity in the new industry, bring equitable justice to the previously incarcerated, redistribute resources to inequitably impacted communities, and provide equitable access to cannabis.

In contrast, public administrators developed the original theory of social equity in the 1970s to provide a philosophical foundation and process for using the mechanisms of program administration and public participation to address societal inequities, not just those inequities created explicitly or implicitly through policy implementation. I extend this theory to include a legislative component that broadens potential solutions by centering the development of cohesive regulatory schema rather than individual policies. I apply the new theory to produce a novel solution that uses the level of legalization as an organizing principle for legislation that seeks to pursue both implementation equity in the new industry and societal equity for the victims of the War on Drugs. In support, I also contribute to the cannabis literature a new empirical compilation of the scope of cannabis inequities, novel historiography of the definition of social equity, and individual critiques of current social equity policies.