Summer School 2026 was dynamic, powerful, & exactly what our movement lawyering community needed in this moment.
During the week of June 22, lawyers, legal workers, law students, movement leaders, and organizers from across the country gathered in Baltimore, MD for Law For Black Lives’ 2026 Summer School: We Keep Us Safe: Community Defense Infrastructure.
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We came together for political education, skills-based training, and community building, grounded in a powerful truth: Black communities need infrastructure to protect, defend, and sustain our communities.
This year, participants studied in two practice-based tracks: Criminal Legal System (CLS) and Transactional Law (TL). While participants spent much of the week going deep in their respective tracks, everyone came together for political education, shared meals, reflections, and opportunities to build understanding and relationships across practice areas.
Throughout the week, we returned to a central question:
What does it mean for lawyers and legal workers to be part of community defense infrastructure and how can we use our legal skills to both defend movement and build the world we need?
CRIMINAL LEGAL SYSTEM TRACK:
Protecting Black Organizers & Advancing Community Defense
The Criminal Legal System Track focused on the tools and strategies lawyers and legal workers can use to defend Black organizers and communities facing state violence, criminalization, surveillance, arrest, detention, and prosecution.
TRANSACTIONAL LAW TRACK:
Building, Protecting, & Sustaining Black Community Infrastructure
The Transactional Law Track focused on the legal infrastructure necessary to build, protect, and sustain Black organizations, cooperatives, and community formations
Day 1 was all about grounding and political context.
Before beginning our core political education sessions, Dayvon Love with Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, provided participants with a powerful grounding in Baltimore, helping us understand the city’s history of resistance, self-determination, and movement organizing. The session connected Baltimore’s history to the broader questions that would shape our time together: How have Black communities protected themselves? What have they built? And what can we learn from those traditions as we face the current political moment?
Participants then moved through four foundational political education sessions.
Erin Cloud and Tanay Harris led an Abolition crash course, inviting participants to understand abolition as an ongoing practice of dismantling anti-Blackness and building new ways of relating to one another. Renee Hatcher introduced participants to Anti-Capitalism and Solidarity Economies, examining capitalism’s racialized and gendered foundations while exploring cooperative and solidarity economy models as alternatives. Participants were challenged to imagine what it would look like to invest in Black futures outside of capitalist frameworks.
Vee Morris Moore and Jasmin Young led a workshop on Black Queer Feminism; using a “house of oppression” framework. Participants explored how systems of oppression operate together and how Black Queer Feminism can function as both a political framework and a practice for centering those most marginalized.
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​We closed the day with Baba Akinyele Umoja and Jasmin Young grounding participants in the history and role of Black self-defense and armed resistance. The session asked participants to think deeply about what it means for lawyers and legal workers to become trusted collaborators in movements for Black liberation.
Day 2 began with Movement Lawyering 101, led by L4BL's Executive Director, Christian Snow, bringing participants back to one of L4BL’s core political commitments: legal work must be rooted in organizers’ power analysis and in the goals of the communities and movements we support. Participants examined the relationship between law, power, and social control and reflected on how lawyers can work in ways that contribute to power building.
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Participants then split into their two tracks.
The Criminal Legal System Track (CLS) began with a local Baltimore panel, “How Are We Protecting Black Organizers and Communities in Baltimore?” Local organizers and movement lawyers shared the landscape of criminalization and community defense work in Baltimore and Maryland, including efforts to fight police violence, support formerly incarcerated people, and build community-based approaches to safety and accountability.
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Participants then explored Community Defense Infrastructure. The session examined the importance of building organized infrastructure that can care for and politicize community, monitor police, and develop collective knowledge and strategy.
The day closed with a deep dive into Participatory Defense, exploring how organizers and communities can become active participants in the defense process. Participants worked through mitigation strategies and examined how participatory defense can build trust, break down information barriers, and strengthen community power.
Meanwhile, the Transactional Law Track (TL) explored “What Are We Building in Baltimore?” through a conversation with local lawyers and organizers working on food sovereignty, affordable housing, and community land trust. The panel highlighted the importance of moving resources and land out of speculative markets and into community control; and the need for lawyers to help communities develop and protect these alternatives.
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Participants then moved into Forming Community Infrastructure, where they explored governance, organizational structures, asset mapping, and the legal relationships behind different forms of community infrastructure. Through a worker cooperative scenario, participants practiced drafting governance structures and thinking through the relationships, roles, and resources necessary to build this infrastructure.
That evening, participants, trainers, L4BL staff, and members of Baltimore’s organizing and movement lawyering community gathered for a social event. After a full day of learning, the evening created space to eat, laugh, connect, and build relationships. Bringing the Summer School cohort together with local movement leaders was an important part of grounding the program in Baltimore and expanding relationships.
Day 3 moved deeper into the practical tools of community defense.
On the Criminal Legal System Track, participants began with Cop Watch, exploring the political purpose of monitoring police and the different models communities can use to document and respond to police activity.
Participants then completed Legal Observer and Police Liaison Training, learning the roles, preparation, communication, and safety practices needed to support direct actions. The training emphasized that legal observers and police liaisons are part of a larger coordinated structure and must remain accountable to their roles and to the organizing taking place around them.
The Know Your Risks session challenged traditional Know Your Rights approaches by asking participants to think about how legal education should change based on the actual risks, organizing conditions, and political context communities are facing.
The day closed with “Break Them Out,” where participants explored legal and political strategies for freeing Black people targeted by criminalization, detention, incarceration, and state repression.
In the Transactional Law Track, participants spent the day focused on Protecting Community Infrastructure. They examined the threats facing movement organizations and considered the difference between perceived and actual risks, how to protect people and institutions, and what skills lawyers need to develop to be great collaborators with movements.
The conversation went beyond legal compliance to examine trust, relationships, internal organizational dynamics, land security, government relationships, and the political choices involved in representing movement organizations. Participants were asked to assess the threats their own organizations and movements are facing and think strategically about how legal support can strengthen that work.
Day 3 moved deeper into the practical tools of community defense.
On the Criminal Legal System Track, participants began with Cop Watch, exploring the political purpose of monitoring police and the different models communities can use to document and respond to police activity.
Participants then completed Legal Observer and Police Liaison Training, learning the roles, preparation, communication, and safety practices needed to support direct actions. The training emphasized that legal observers and police liaisons are part of a larger coordinated structure and must remain accountable to their roles and to the organizing taking place around them.
The Transactional Law Track closed with Sustaining Community Infrastructure, examining the lifecycle of organizations and the legal and political questions that emerge as organizations grow, experience conflict, face funding challenges, or enter periods of transition. Participants explored mission drift, leadership concentration, succession planning, conflict resolution, burnout, accountability, and organizational sustainability.
The session challenged participants to think about sustainability as more than organizational survival. What does it mean to build organizations that can sustain relationships, trust, political commitments, and community accountability over time? Participants worked through scenarios involving organizational conflict, leadership transitions, financial decisions, and government scrutiny, applying the legal and political frameworks they had developed throughout the week
t was an honor to participate in L4BL's Summer School with my peers and new technicians. Allowing me to move between tracks as a participant, observer, mentor, and offer reflections at the end of each day helped ground me as well as the group. It was affirming, gratifying, and intriguing. It felt affirming of me and my generation's legal workers and community's efforts to keep and contextualize systemic Anglo-U.S. Jurisprudence open, viewed, and used as a social change support tool and/or weapon. Being able to interact with developing researchers, theoreticians, and practitioners allowed me to assess me and my generation's substantive and procedural contributions to the trade and movement against today's challenges and jointly mediate them in anticipation of the next. The battles are large measure the same, but upgraded, with more technology.
The Summer School centering “community defense infrastructure,” gives me hope and reminds me of lessons from earlier struggles. Chief among the struggles being balancing and prioritizing the needs and assessing the benefits of/to the movement and its new and old technicians. . . passing or running alongside those taking up, having carried/still carrying the baton, mediating hindsight, insight, foresight, age/patience, class, and egos. I was glad to see and applaud the engagement of seasoned activist-organizer historians and activist-organizer practitioner/technicians of systemic Anglo-U.S. Jurisprudence, as well as local folks. This will hopefully lead to working jointly on matters and mediating the existence of the new and legacy formations, revitalizing the old and fortifying the new. In the meantime, the best defense is still a good offense--- move fast and break things.
Summer School 2026 reminded us that community defense needs infrastructure.
Community Defense is the relationships that allow us to respond when someone
is arrested.
It is the community knowledge that helps people understand and navigate risk.
It is the bail fund, the Cop Watch team, the legal observers,
the participatory defense network.
It is the worker cooperative, the community land trust, the mutual aid formation, and the organization with governance structures strong enough to withstand attack.
It is organizers and community members.
It is movement lawyers and legal workers.
And it is the relationships we build with one another.
One of the biggest successes of Summer School was what happened between the sessions. Participants connected deeply with one another and continued conversations outside of programming, building relationships that extended beyond the formal curriculum. The cohort created an intergenerational space where lawyers, legal workers, law students, movement elders, and organizers, could learn from one another.
We are grateful to every participant, facilitator, movement elder, organizer, speaker, local community member, vendor and staff member who helped make Summer School 2026 magical!
WE KEEP US SAFE. AND WE BUILD THE INFRASTRUCTURE TO DO IT TOGETHER.
We had an incredible group of facilitators and speakers join us this Summer School. Since we did two tracks for the first time that means we had double the amount of speakers, so double the amount of brilliance shared and learning that took place! We'd like to thank each of our speakers and facilitators for sharing your knowledge, your energy and your time with us this Summer School 2026.
