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Ossei-Owusu will discuss his manuscript in progress, The People's Champ: Legal Aid from Slavery to Mass Incarceration. The book uses archival research, court documents, oral histories, and interviews to highlight the role of legal aid organizations in long standing struggles for racial justice.

Shaun Ossei-Owusu is Presidential Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. He is an interdisciplinary legal scholar with expertise in legal history, criminal law and procedure, civil rights, and the legal profession. His work sits at the intersection of law, history, and sociology, and focuses on how governments meet their legal obligations to provide protections and benefits to poor people and racial minorities. He also works on stratification in legal education and the legal profession.

His work has been published or is forthcoming in the New York University Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Virginia Law Review, Michigan Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Southern California Law Review, Wisconsin Law Review, and the American Journal of Law & Medicine, among other outlets. His public writing has appeared in the ABA Journal, American Prospect, Boston Review, Jacobin, Public Books, and Salon. His book project, The People's Champ: Legal Aid from Slavery to Mass Incarceration, is under contract with Harvard University Press.

Elizabeth Hinton is Associate Professor in the Department of History and the Department of African American Studies at Yale, with a secondary appointment as Professor of Law at the Law School. Hinton’s research focuses on the persistence of poverty, racial inequality, and urban violence in the 20th century United States. She is considered one of the nation’s leading experts on criminalization and policing. In her book From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Harvard University Press), Hinton examines the implementation of federal law enforcement programs beginning in the mid-1960s that transformed domestic social policies and laid the groundwork for the expansion of the U.S. prison system.

Hinton’s articles and op-eds can be found in the pages of the Journal of American History, the Journal of Urban History, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Boston Review, The Nation, and Time. She also coedited The New Black History: Revisiting the Second Reconstruction (Palgrave Macmillan) with the late historian Manning Marable.