How to Abolish Prisons with Justin Piché

Meet  filmmaker and artist Sook-Yin Lee,  graphic artist Chester Brown and experts Dr. Chris Bruckert and Dr. Ummni Khan. Following a screening of the film Paying For It, this panel discussed the book behind the film, and how how law circumscribes love, intimacy and our relationships. Sponsored by the Greenberg Chair for Women and the Legal Profession, this event took place in September 2025. 

Meet Ardi Imseis, law professor and lawyer who represented Palestine before the International Court of Justice in the Advisory Opinion on Israel's Illegal Presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Professor Imseis is also the author of The United Nations and the Question of Palestine. He talks about the advisory opinion and what it means for international law and how we can harness it for the continuing BDS movement.

Join this intimate conversation between Adelle Blackett, Canada Research Chair in Transnational Labour Law at the Faculty of Law, McGill University and Canisia Lubrin, award winning poet and writer who teaches at the University of Guelph Creative Writing MFA program. They talk about Canisia's debut fiction Code Noir and the enduring legacies of the colonial law that created the material conditions of slavery.

We speak with Reakash Walters as she provides an analytical toolkit for those who want to work with and not merely represent marginalized peoples and communities. She shares her research co-conducted with a former prisoner and how her friendship with him brings to light how Black friendship is criminalized in Canada. An important conversation about participatory law, and how lawyers can be part of community struggles in respectful ways.

We speak with four lawyers who intervene in the courts on behalf of community organizations. What is an intervention and why is it an important entry point for community organizations to converse with the courts. With Sandra Ka Hon Chu, Rosel Kim, Annamaria Enenajor and Naseem Mithoowani, we talk about four case studies they worked on, the importance of incremental change, and how the long game is important to have in sight.

Meet award winning writer, performance artist and community healer Kai Cheng Thom. She talks about how love can be a framework for transformative change and how even in the face of hate and denialism, compassion and love is what she has for everyone, even those that have none for her. We talk about her latest book, Falling in Love with Being Human, and how law students can use love in movement lawyering and community building. A must listen.

Meet Justin Piché, co author of the book How to Abolish Prisons with Rachel Herzing. We talk about this book and how abolition is not just a theoretical concept but a practice and a possibility. Justin reveals his research with Rachel and how collective reconstruction to get rid of human cages is a viable movement despite the dark struggles around us.

In this episode, I speak with Petra Molnar about her new book The Walls Have Eyes where her research uncovers what technological experiments are taking place at various borders around the world on migrants as test subjects, and how the consequences of greater use and lack of oversight over tech use on people will shape our society in harmful ways. We discuss how such technology may reinforce and reproduce colonial, racist and oppressive ideas and systems.

Martin Luther King Jr once said that civil disobedience is not lawlessness but a higher form of lawfulness. In this episode, I speak with Faisal Bhabha, Irina Ceric and Paul Champ, lawyers and scholars intimate with protest and law. We talk about three case studies and what are appropriate legal limits to protest in a democratic society.

Meet immigration and refugee lawyer, Debbie Rachlis. We talk about the Gaza Special Measures Program, why nobody has been able to come through that program, and what it tells us about IRCC's ad hoc approaches to humanitarian crises.