Revealing the Hidden Foundations of American Law and Confronting Wrongful Conviction
Our justice system is broken. Racial violence, police brutality, wrongful imprisonment, mass shootings, segregation, slavery, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide continue to shape the American psyche. The Melvin Lee Wrongful Conviction Law School asserts that these injustices persist because the legal education system has failed to confront its true foundations.
Traditional legal education emphasizes British common law, Greco-Roman philosophy, and selective constitutional history, while erasing more than two centuries of American slavery from the curriculum. As a result, generations of lawyers are trained without understanding that the laws of slavery form the actual foundation of American jurisprudence.
Since 1619, American courts have upheld, defended, and enforced legalized discrimination as a mechanism of economic growth and nation-building. Our mission is to teach the true history of American law, train students to recognize injustice, and prepare them to litigate across every level and branch of the legal system.
The primary aim of the Melvin Lee Wrongful Conviction Law School is to end racism and restore justice to a broken legal system. Our three-year program focuses on the nexus between slave law and wrongful conviction, preparing students to become the first generation of scholars formally trained in this critical field.
We seek applicants with a foundational understanding of African-American history, judicial studies, or lived experience with injustice. Students from all professional and academic backgrounds are welcome.
We extend a special invitation to law students and scholars who have stood against injustice and faced rescinded offers, academic harassment, professional retaliation, or personal threats for speaking truth.
Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.