DJC is founded on the belief that we cannot build cities that work for everyone without remedying the impacts of mass incarceration and transforming our justice system. We are looking for creative, experienced professionals to support our mission to deliver community lawyering services, create economic opportunities, and promote just cities.
We strongly encourage people of color, women, LGBTQ people, people with disabilities, and individuals with past involvement in the criminal punishment system or who have loved ones currently or formerly in the criminal punishment system to apply.
The Detroit Justice Center seeks passionate legal interns to join our team every summer. DJC is founded on the belief that we cannot build cities that work for everyone without remedying the impacts of mass incarceration and transforming our justice system. This mission requires innovative ways of community lawyering—rooted in defensive and offensive fights for racial justice and economic equity—that build up our poorest residents through direct services and novel approaches to land use, housing, and employment.
Our interns join our team in Detroit to work on a varied caseload, including advocacy, direct representation, litigation, community education, and research. Interns will engage with our multi-faceted approach to movement lawyering, community engagement and policy change.
Over ten weeks, our interns will see first-hand the unique opportunities and challenges of implementing a movement lawyering approach in Detroit. Interns will receive structured training to develop and deepen their understanding of movement lawyering through a curriculum of weekly readings, seminars, and reflections. We will also be partnering with other movement lawyering organizations, including Amistad Law Project, Community Justice Project, and Law for Black Lives, to host an opening retreat and cross-organizational exchanges, so interns can learn about and engage with other organizational approaches to movement lawyering.
As each of our organizations strives to forge a new path for legal practices that grows with the needs of communities and movements, there has been a great deal of interest in mentorship, political education, training, and leadership development. Without a centralized network or clearly defined path to become a movement lawyer, our organizations came together to develop a groundbreaking internship for law students.
Our summer fellows program began with a June 2019 opening retreat in Miami where interns were introduced to the work of all three organizations. Interns were engaged in a 10-week curriculum of political education, readings, seminars, and reflections. They worked alongside attorneys within our organizations on a varied caseload, including advocacy, direct representation, litigation, and research. While in Detroit, our interns encountered the structural inequity of the justice system, while supporting our team in fighting tax foreclosure and gentrification, building community land trusts and worker cooperatives, challenging water shutoffs, blocking new jail construction, fighting for bail reform, and implementing new restorative justice programs. Interns were also guided to develop and deepen their understanding of movement lawyering through a curriculum of weekly readings, seminars, and reflections.
This shared program was designed to be more than an internship. As our organizations grow, we are building a pipeline for new movement lawyers to be equipped to fight alongside organizers at local and national levels.
— Nick Aquinos, 2021 Intern
— Ashley Moton, 2020 Intern
— Taylor Dodson, 2019 Intern
— Shirley Rivas, 2019 Intern
— Meredith Luneack, 2019 Intern
— Vishal Reddy, 2019 Intern
— Lindsay Calka, Intern
The Detroit Justice Center believes that creativity and art are essential to imagining and building a world where every human life is valued with equal care and consideration and disposing of people is no longer considered justice. As attorneys and advocates, we are inundated by words, concepts, figures, and statistics that are intended to demonstrate the possibility of abolition and create ever tighter coalitions to express its urgency. Data in many ways is the currency of social justice and economic equity, but it cannot evoke the sense of possibility, wonder, and imagination that art and media can.
Inspired by Detroit’s long history of arts and activism, and thanks to generous donations from Michigan Arts and Culture Council administered by CULTURESOURCE and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, we are continuing our artist residency for artists living in Wayne County, MI. We are asking applicants to submit a project proposal that grapples with the question “What does a world without police and incarceration look like?” What would it feel like to exist in a world without the police and incarceration, without jails, prisons, and detention centers? What would be the textures and sensations of that world? What patterns of interactions and relationships would transform for the communities that would be born as we realize these demands of structural change?
Applicants may work in any artistic medium, and may submit four work samples as part of the application process. We ask that applicants who used time-based mediums (such as dance, music, and video) limit their work samples to no more than 20 minutes total. Anyone submitting written work is asked to limit their work sample to no more than 15 pages total.
The artist whose project is chosen by our panelists will receive $10,000 and will have until the end of 2022 to create and execute the proposed project.
We strongly encourage people of color, women, LGBTQ people, people with disabilities, and individuals with past involvement in the criminal punishment system or who have loved ones currently or formerly in the criminal punishment system to apply.
