In addition to rallying for causes such as workers' rights and an end to sweatshop labor, University students will soon be able to take a closer look at justice and devise effective methods to invoke change.
The Princeton Justice Project — a new group on campus whose goal is to establish a program that will combine academic research and legal activism — will hold its first organizational meeting tonight at 9:30 p.m. in Robertson Bowl 6.
The project was the brain child of local lawyer Bill Potter GS '83, who developed the idea while precepting for POL 318: Law and Society last semester, according to politics professor Kiki Jamieson.
The project will use research and data gathered from independent work by students to promote equal justice on issues that matter to them.
"The Princeton Justice Project is a flexible concept for melding academic research on real-life issues and promoting direct action in hopes of putting what you learn to the test of decision-making by those in power," Potter said in an e-mail.
Potter came up with the idea for the project after he led a student visit to the maximum security Trenton State Prison. He said it was the combination of an eye-opening prison visit and course readings that made him realize that he could do something about the injustices his class was studying.
Potter had also been contacted by many of his students who were concerned with the issues discussed in class and the readings. It was through their questions and interest that he began to loosely model a project to get students involved.
"Not just learning about law and society," he explained, "but doing something about it."
Neither Jamieson nor Potter are sure what the exact focus or eventual organization of the new group will be.
"It's very open ended and we don't really know what direction it's going to go," Jamieson said. "It will depend on who shows up to the meeting and the ideas that they bring."
Potter said he thinks many of his students are prepared for political advocacy and know how to take action after their experiences during the fall semester.
"I gave them a last short paper, asked them to choose one injustice and then write what they would do if given the chance," he said.
One example of these injustices that Potter thought was well presented was one student's ideas about how to "inform the driving public of their constitutional rights when confronted with requests for consent searches," he said.
Other ideas that students discussed in their papers that Potter said might be brought up in the meeting include the monitoring of racial profiling incidents by police, working with incarcerated individuals "on literacy and counseling programs" and "gender and racial bias in the criminal justice system."
"My hope is that this might be something of a bridge between the real world and the academic world," Potter said.
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