| A Celebration of CJS's Work the Past Year |
|
Trouble Viewing? View online.
|
| |
| |
|
Celebrating CJS
|
| |
|
Watch Melba's update at the video above or keep reading below.
Hi everyone,
As we walk into this final Council Meeting and Annual of my term and before this chapter closes for good, I wanted to take a few minutes on camera with you directly. It has been the honor of my professional life to serve as your Chair, and I want to spend this time doing what lawyers rarely get to do, looking back and telling you plainly what we built.
We started this term needing to make real choices about our budget. We made cuts. We didn't get to do everything we wanted to do this year, and I won't pretend otherwise. But we close this term with a balanced budget and a Section that is genuinely better off than the one that I inherited. Building off the hard work of past Chairs Tina Luongo and Sidney Butcher, that discipline is something I'm proud to hand to the next Chair. And even with those constraints, our programming grew, our resolutions grew; Committee participation is up across the board. That is the real health of this ection.
And my hope is that this momentum doesn't just hold, it builds. We held three regional events this Fall and one this Spring, putting our work into rooms it hadn't reached before. And at our Spring Meeting, we went straight at it. We took on current civil rights law, the failures that we're dealing with as a result of the changes in the administration and the collision between artificial intelligence and criminal law. What is AI's role in the courtroom? And this, of course, was capped by a reception that was generously sponsored by Axon.
I also want to recognize our Committee of the Year, the International Committee, led by co-Chairs Bruce Zagaris and Tyler Hodgson. Their work this year set the bar for every Committee in this Section. Congratulations and I hope that all the Committee Chairs for the coming year just dive deeper and continue to raise the issues that they're seeing on the ground and turning that into policy.
While I'll no longer be your Chair, I will continue my service to the Section in this new bar year as your Section Delegate in the House of Delegates, as the Section’s Liaison to ABA's Committee on Domestic and Sexual Violence, as well as our Section’s Liaison to the National Black Prosecutors Association. And as I step back from this seat, I'm excited to work on the launch of the Global Diaspora Justice Institute in 2027 because the fight for justice was never meant to stop at this country's border. And it is beyond time for us to build more bridges with our colleagues in the Caribbean and in Africa. So stay tuned for further details on our inaugural event in Kingston, Jamaica.
To Nina who takes the helm next, congratulations! You inherit a Section in strong shape, and my hope for you is simple - keep moving us in this direction. I of course cannot close without thanking our amazing staff who worked so tirelessly behind the scenes to make everything a move. I could not have done this without them. So, thank you to all of our ABA staff and thank you to all of you for your support, for your feedback, for your comments, for pushing back because that's what makes us better.
In closing, I became an attorney because of people who looked at the law as it was written and refused to accept it as the final word. Lawyers who sat in, who marched, who took cases nobody thought they could win because they understood that justice doesn't execute itself, it has to be demanded, built, and rebuilt generation after generation by people willing to do the unglamorous work. Every Committee meeting, every resolution, every regional event this Section held this year is a small piece of that same much older fight. Thank you for letting me lead this chapter of it.
And I will end with my favorite quote from the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “If you can't fly, then run. If you can’t run, then walk. If you can't walk, then crawl. But whatever you do, keep moving forward.”
Take care and see you soon.
Melba Pearson
ABA CJS Chair 2025-2026
|
| |
| |
| |
|
American Bar Association
321 North Clark Street
Chicago, IL 60654
800-285-2221 312-988-5522
Your e-mail address will only be used within the ABA.
We do not sell or rent e-mail addresses.
|
| |
| |
|
|
| |
This message was sent to [email protected].
Your e-mail address will only be used within the ABA.
We do not sell or rent e-mail addresses.
|
| |
American Bar Association
1050 Connecticut Ave NW #400, Washington, DC 20036
800-285-2221 | 312-988-5522
|
| |
|
|
| More ABA Resources |
|
|
| |
|
|
