I am an attorney and educator deeply interested in the complex dynamics that propagate between legal institutions and social movements in the context of periods (or eras) of crisis. Currently, I serve as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Law at Penn State Dickinson Law, where I am currently teaching Professional Responsibility, Trial Advocacy, and “Law in Emergency,” a seminar that delves into my research interests. Additionally, I am a partner at O’Neill and Hassen LLP, a law firm dedicated to indigent criminal defense. Prior to this, I was a co-founder of Black Movement-Law Project, a rapid legal response initiative that emerged in response to uprisings in places like Ferguson and Baltimore, and Mass Defense Coordinator at the National Lawyers Guild. My background also includes roles as a political campaign manager and strategist, union and community organizer, music venue doorman, film projectionist, and carpenter.

My work focuses on the interplay between race, technology, and legal institutions, alongside the practice and theory of social and political movements. I am committed to developing scholarship that examine these topics from multiple angles, seeking to incorporate insights from political philosophy, legal theory, and history. I hope to understand the role of law as a tool for social change, while also being cognizant of its limitations, as I contribute to building effective organizations for societal transformation and exploring new horizons of possibility.

Downloadable Bio Here

Some Quotes I Like

To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter.

— James Baldwin

Pragmatism … urges that humanity is an open-ended notion, that the word ‘human’ names a fuzzy but promising project rather than an essence.

— Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope

Like life, racial understanding is not something that we find but something that we must create. What we find when we enter these mortal plains is existence; but existence is the raw material out of which all life must be created.

— Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community

Man is not built around an inner thermometer, measuring the amount of pleasure or happiness, with a kind of permanent con­cern to maximise its readings: nor on the other hand is he a potential angel, fully gratified by living in some rational, humani­tarian order… Man is, instead, the prey of his Dark Gods.

— Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change

Any intelligent bureaucracy will try to decrease possible resistance by emphasizing the merely temporary character of any imposed hardship even though it has no idea when the emergency will end and even if it knows that the new control, by its very existence and through the vested interests it creates, will tend to become permanent.

— Ernst Fraenkel, The Dual State

Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires. But it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency.

— James Madison, The Federalist 10

The theorist who intervenes in practical controversies nowadays discovers on a regular basis and to his shame that whatever ideas he might contribute were expressed long ago—and usually better the first time around.

— Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords

The concept of a single, exclusive, and unchanging ethnic or cultural or other identity is a dangerous piece of brainwashing. Human mental identities are not like shoes, of
which we can only wear one pair at a time. We are all multi-dimensional beings.

— Eric Hobsbawm, Language, Culture, and National Identity

The observer should not just practice a method that permits her to shift from one perspective to another…. She also needs a method to access a meta­ point of view on the diverse points of view, including her own point of view.

— Edgar Morin, On Complexity

Well, we’re barely a nation at all anymore, but I’m glad we’re still in space. We have to be going some place other than down the toilet.

— Octavia E. Butler, (Lauren) Parable of the Sower

Selected Media and Publications

• Interview with me on EFF’s “How to Fix the Internet”
• Meet the EFA, Panel at HOPE 20, (video linked)
• The Left Should Direct the Impeachment Effort, Truthout.org
• Mueller Investigation Will Set a Precedent — Make It a Good One, Truthout.org
• Panel at The 35th Session of The Human Rights Council: Rights to Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and of Association in The U.S., Geneva, CH (video linked)
• Encryption vs. Surveillance in the New Civil Rights Movement, Truthout.org
• Aaron Was a Criminal and So Are You, Commondreams.org