Adam Lee
Law students wear many hats, and at Osgoode, many students also wear the hat of being community organizers. I had the honour of interviewing 12 JD students about their involvement in various social justice movements and community initiatives this past year. Here is an overview of their work.
Adam Lee (3L) is an activist who has attended several labour rallies over the past year (including for the $15 and Fairness campaign) and has joined picket lines in solidarity with teachers and with janitors. He is involved in prison abolition work and supporting prison organizing. Adam will be pursing an LLM at Osgoode starting in the fall, and his proposed thesis is about prison labour in Ontario.
As part of their involvement with the Toronto Prisoners’ Rights Project (TPRP), Adam recently co-organized and co-emceed a rally outside the Bell office in Toronto. “Bell holds the [prison phone system] contract with the provincial government,” they explained, “so on Bell’s ‘Let’s Talk’ Day, we called out their hypocrisy in the way they promote themselves as a mental health champion while simultaneously destroying the mental health of those who are incarcerated.”
The sheer facts about what happens on the inside of prisons drew Adam into the movement – as he put it, simply “a recognition that the prison is such a site of injustice.”
Adam conveyed the message that “Law is not meant to be an equal game. The law is meant to uphold systems of oppression. It’s in many ways the instrument of capitalism. Criminal law protects property more than anything else. Immigration law necessarily upholds border sovereignty and is constructed to not allow for open borders and open movement.”
When asked how being a law student informs his community involvement, Adam said, “It’s shown me that the law was never meant to be a tool for equality and, in many ways, we’re fighting against law. Community involvement has given me the perspective to realize that being a law student … is not to be just another legal actor who is going to sit inside the institution and push law reform around. It’s shown me the reality of law as it appears on the ground. We have this inequality within the law – what does that actually look like? Once you see what that looks like, how can you go back to law and say, ‘this is fine, this is justice’?”
Adam issued the following call to action: “Lawyering is itself a very limited framework in terms of what it can achieve, politically. The real radical, political change that justice requires has to come from the streets, from communities, from organizing and mobilizing. It has to be not just legal defence work but, rather community work and movement work.”