LAWYERING FOR LIBERATION | A Busboys and Poets Books Presentation
Date and Time
Mar 26, 2026 6:00 pm
Location
14th & V
2021 14th St NW, Washington, District of Columbia, 20009
Mar 26, 2026 6:00 pm
14th & V
"This is not just a manual for resistance—though it is that. It's a call to reimagine what legal work in service of liberation actually looks like. In a moment when authoritarianism is consolidating and traditional legal strategies are failing, that reimagining couldn’t be more urgent." —The Anti-Authoritarian Playbook
This fiery manifesto provides a concrete action plan for legal professionals and activists advancing Black liberation and transformative social change.
Revolutions happen in the streets, not in courtrooms. But in the struggle against systems increasingly designed to perpetuate inequality and benefit those in power, lawyers must do their part. As leaders from the acclaimed movement lawyering and advocacy organization Law for Black Lives, editors Marbré Stahly-Butts and Ameca Reali have spent years on the front lines of transformative social change. With Lawyering for Liberation, they offer concrete tools for fellow legal workers and lawyers working to achieve a just future.
Grounded in the politics of abolition, Black queer feminism, and anticapitalism, this approachable how-to guide distills key concepts of movement lawyering and assembles advice from dozens of lawyers, legal workers, and organizers in areas like jail and bail support, stop-and-frisk litigation, protester defense, reparations, family law, housing, and more. The result is not just a manual for resistance but an urgent call to join the movement.
Co-editor of Lawyering for Liberation and former Executive Director of Law for Black Lives Marbré Stahly-Butts is joining us on the Busboys stage alongside visionary civil rights leader and movement lawyer Judith Browne Dianis and Iman Freeman, co-founder and Executive Director of Baltimore Action Legal Team. Copies of the book will be available for purchase during and after the event, and the co-editor and contributing authors will be signing following the program.
This event is free and open to all. Our program begins at 6:00 pm, and will be followed by an audience Q&A. Copies of LAWYERING FOR LIBERATION will be available for purchase before and after the event. Please note that this event is in person.
We ask that guests RSVP in order to receive direct updates about the event from Busboys and Poets Books
BOOK DETAILS
Lawyering for Liberation
A Toolbox for Movement Lawyers
Edited by Ameca Reali and Marbré Stahly-Butts
January 06, 2026 | Paperback, 288 pages, $19.95
All proceeds of the book benefit Law for Black Lives
Marbré Stahly-Butts (she/her), co-founder and former Executive Director of Law for Black Lives has worked closely with organizers and communities across the country to advance and actualize radical policy. She co-founded and served on the Leadership Team of the Movement for Black Lives Policy Table and was one of the chief architects of the Vision for Black Lives Policy Platform. Since graduating from Yale Law School, Marbré has supported local and national organizations from across the country in their policy development and advocacy. She was a co-founder of the National Bail Out Collective and the People's Coalition for Safety and Freedom. Before her role at Law for Black LivesMarbré worked as Deputy Director of Racial Justice at the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD). She joined CPD as a Soros Justice Fellow in Fall 2013. Her Soros Justice work focused on organizing and working with families affected by aggressive policing and criminal justice policies in New York City in order to develop meaningful bottom-up policy reforms. While in law school, Marbré focused on the intersection of criminal justice and civil rights and gained legal experience with the Bronx Defenders, the Equal Justice Initiative, and the Prison Policy Initiative. Before law school, Marbré received her Masters in African Studies from Oxford University and studied in Zimbabwe, where she focused on community responses to violence. She also taught in South Africa at Nelson Mandela's alma mater. Marbré graduated from Columbia University, with a B.A. in African-American History and Human Rights. In addition to her work to support and build movement Marbré is busy trying to raise two young children to be joyful and purpose-filled people.
Judith Browne Dianis is a visionary civil rights leader and movement lawyer with more than 25 years of experience advancing transformative change for communities of color. She recently transitioned out of her role as Executive Director and co-founder of Advancement Project and founder of Advancement Project Action Fund, where she pioneered bold strategies that align legal advocacy, organizing, and narrative power to dismantle structural racism and strengthen democracy.
Widely recognized as the “Godmother” of the movement to end the school-to-prison pipeline, Judith has led groundbreaking efforts in voting rights, education justice, and criminal justice reform—including work that restored voting rights to more than 1.4 million people in Florida and advanced historic protections across the South. A trusted national spokesperson, she has testified before Congress and appeared on major media platforms including MSNBC, CNN, and NPR.
A graduate of Columbia Law School and the Wharton School of Business, Judith started her legal career at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, where she ultimately served as Managing Attorney of the DC office and Director of the Fair Housing Program. She is the recipient of the inaugural Democracy Prize from the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, honoring her courageous leadership in building a more inclusive, multiracial democracy.
Today, she continues to inspire audiences nationwide with a powerful message about justice, strategy, and the enduring possibility of change.
Iman Freeman is the co-founder and Executive Director of Baltimore Action Legal Team (BALT), a movement lawyering organization founded in 2015 in the aftermath of Freddie Gray's death. BALT operates at the intersection of community legal education, direct legal services, and strategic litigation — rooted in the conviction that legal tools are instruments of harm reduction and power-building, not reform.
Under Iman's leadership, BALT grew from a volunteer-led effort to a fully staffed independent nonprofit, including successfully transitioning from a fiscal sponsorship to its own 501(c)(3). BALT is the only organization in Baltimore providing free warrant recalls and one of the few offering expungement services — direct interventions that reduce the immediate harms of a system that is not broken, but functioning exactly as designed. BALT has also secured over $160,000 in electronic monitoring assistance for 131 residents during the COVID-19 pandemic, contributed to Maryland's 2017 bail reform coalition, and successfully litigated to compel the Baltimore Police Department to disclose its "do not call" list, revealing 305 officers with credibility issues that had been shielded from public accountability.
Iman brings over a decade of experience as an attorney and more than twenty years in federal public service, where she held senior leadership roles at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as a strategic management professional. In that capacity, she was responsible for several public-facing priority documents and the development of performance management frameworks that shaped agency operations. She also played a key role in what became the largest reorganization in FDA history — a structural transformation driven by the infant formula crisis that fundamentally changed how the agency responds to public health emergencies. She is closely aligned with Law for Black Lives, a national network of over 3,500 radical lawyers committed to building a legal infrastructure responsive to movement organizations, and serves on its advisory board.
A contributor to Lawyering for Liberation (University of California Press), Iman has also taught at American University Washington College of Law, where she earned her Juris Doctorate and was recognized as "Board Member of the Year" for her leadership in the Mid-Atlantic Black Law Students Association (MABLSA.) She holds a Master of Public Administration from Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy at SUNY Albany and a Bachelor of Science in Justice Studies from Georgia Southern University.
