Gender, Race & Participatory Democracy in Bolivarian Venezuela

featuring Fernando Vegas, Venezuelan Supreme Court Justice, J. Soffiyah Elijah of the Harvard Criminal Law Institute and Barbara Dougan of the National Lawyers Guild

Thursday, April 16, 2009, 7:00 - 9:00 p.m. Fernando Ramón Vegas Torrealba, Venezuelan Supreme Court Justice, is a judicial expert. On the aftermath of the Venezuelan 1999 Constitutional reform, Justice Vegas Torrealba was appointed to the Supreme Tribunal of Justice (TSJ) in August 2004, and assumed office on January 2005, where he sits in the Electoral Chamber of the Supreme Court.

Justice Vegas is an expert in constitutional law and commercial relations and has written and lectured extensively in this area. The Justice is a published novelist and writes regular columns for newspapers and journals.

He earned his law degree at the Central University of Venezuela in 1971, a master's degree in the Laws of Economic Integration in 1977 and a master in Negotiations and Conflict Resolution at the Institute of National Defense in 2006.

Justice Vegas has visited US in various occasions to lecture about human rights, participatory democracy and the Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.

J. Soffiyah Elijah serves as Deputy Director of the Criminal Justice Institute (CJI) at Harvard Law School (HLS). Under Ms. Elijah’s leadership, HLS won the 2004 National Criminal Justice Trial Advocacy Competition, the same Competition at which HLS placed second in 2003. Ms. Elijah’s leadership proved victorious again in March 2005; her legal expertise helped secure the release of a CJI client who had been incarcerated for 31 years.

Prior to coming to Harvard Law School, Ms. Elijah was a member of the faculty at the City University of New York (CUNY) School of Law. She served as Director and Supervising Attorney of the Defender Clinic. At the Child Welfare Advocacy Fellowship Program, where she also served as Director and Supervising Attorney, Ms. Elijah directed the development of law students to work as creative advocates in New York City’s child welfare system. In addition, Professor Elijah taught courses in criminal procedure and juvenile rights.

Ms. Elijah practiced law through various avenues before transitioning into the clinical practice of academia. She was a Supervising Attorney at the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem (NDS), where she defended indigent members of the Harlem, New York community. Before joining NDS, Ms. Elijah was in private practice, specializing in criminal defense and family law. She also worked as a Staff Attorney for the Juvenile Rights Division of the Legal Aid Society.

With more than 20 years in the legal profession, the scope of her interests and scholarship is diverse. Prof. Elijah has authored several articles and publications based on her research of the U.S. criminal justice and prison systems. She has represented numerous political prisoners and social activists over the past 18 years. And, her travels to Cuba over the past 13 years have enabled her to conduct extensive research on the country’s legal system, with a focus on its approach to criminal justice issues. Ms. Elijah was awarded a Revson Fellowship at Columbia University to continue research in her areas of interest. Prof. Elijah’s current research and scholarship focuses on criminal justice issues and the prison industrial complex.

Barbara Dougan will be representing the National Lawyers Guild. She is currently working on drug policy and will talk about the "war on drugs" and its disasterous impact on communities of color.

Most of her experience is in civil law, including 16 years as a civil rights lawyer in Boston, specializing in race discrimination cases, and 11 years in Legal Services programs, working on povery law issues but obviously race and gender are huge parts of the problem.