Vanderbilt Law School’s Social Justice Reporter, a new student-edited legal journal, will publish this fall and focus on social justice, civil rights and public interest lawyering by leading researchers, practitioners, policymakers and law students.
Five students — Isiah Ellison, JD/MBA Class of 2023, and Natalie Graves, Elle Hashimoto, Miles Malbrough and Kate Uyeda of the Class of 2022 — worked throughout the 2020-21 academic year to lay the groundwork for the journal as members of the New Journal Student Committee. Ellison will lead the editorial team in the coming year, and Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity and Community Yesha Yadav will be its faculty adviser.
“We look forward to ensuring that this journal provides a platform for top scholars, practitioners, activists and students as they wrestle with some of the most challenging and consequential issues of the day,” Yadav said. “This new journal would not have been possible without the initiative, vision, dedication and hard work of an extraordinarily talented group of students.”
Vanderbilt issued a call this spring to recruit rising second- and third-year students interested in joining the journal’s inaugural editorial staff. Yadav and Ellison hope to have the inaugural editorial staff of the Social Justice Reporter in place by fall 2022.
The Social Justice Reporter will be published online and feature a mix of scholarship, short essays and opinion pieces.
The Social Justice Reporter takes its name from the storied Race Relations Law Reporter, a pioneering social justice journal launched at Vanderbilt in 1956 and funded by $200,000 grant from the Ford Foundation. The RRLR was published until 1972 to wide readership. The statutes, court decisions, administrative rulings and other legal developments related to race and the law published in the RRLR influenced legislation and jurisprudence.
“I am excited to build on the legacy of the Race Relations Reporter, and I am deeply grateful to the students and faculty who have developed this new journal,” said Chris Guthrie, dean and John Wade-Kent Syverud Professor of Law.
