Hasmik Geghamyan
Hasmik Geghamyan has joined the Sustainable Economies Law Center as a Staff Attorney, deepening her relationship with the organization where she has been a fellow since 2014 and the Board's Secretary since 2020. An interdisciplinary and community-focused lawyer, Hasmik's practice areas include democratic transitions of land into various models of community ownership, general labor law compliance, and services tailored to cooperatives, small democratically-led businesses, and nonprofits. She believes that a cross-functional model of activism, policy, organizing, and law, led by frontline communities, can be effectively used to bring about a just and ecological society.
Mohit Mookim
Mohit Mookim (they/them) is a land justice and wealth redistribution lawyer committed to abolition, landback, and anti-capitalist solidarity economies. Their work at the Law Center aims to liberate land from the speculative market by supporting collectives led by Black, Indigenous, and/or poor people. Mohit also leads the Law Center's wealth redistribution work, helping donors opt out of extractive financial systems and instead commit to grassroots social movements. They were raised in a big South Asian immigrant family on Lenapehoking (the NYC metro area) and have lived on Ohlone land in the Bay Area, CA for the last decade. They went to Stanford University for undergrad and law school.
Veryl Pow
Veryl aspires to be, in the words of Joy James, a “guerrilla” teacher and scholar. Veryl’s politics developed from his grassroots organizing experiences in Seattle around Palestine and Third World solidarity, abolition, and anti-austerity campaigns; and refined through his rebellious lawyering experiences in South Los Angeles around traffic court debt. As a teacher of law, Veryl challenges his students to critique black letter legal doctrines in their origins and material outcomes, while simultaneously reimagine and repurpose the law towards collective liberation. His scholarly musings center on racial capitalism, critical race theory, and destituent power.
A lawyer by training, Veryl’s conception of movement lawyering has been inspired by his tenure in Baltimore, where grassroots community members have creatively and resiliently built urban farms, cooperatives, and community land trusts in response to neoliberal conditions of disinvestment, immiseration, and death. Rather than litigate or legislate to reform a broken system, he encourages movement lawyers to instead support such grassroots prefigurative efforts that are attempting to remake social relations to land and people from extraction and competition to stewardship and mutual aid. In his previous capacity as a clinical instructor at the University of Baltimore School of Law, Veryl provided legal representation to these forms of nontraditional organizations, and to other activist organizations fighting to end police violence or resist displacement from gentrification.
In his free time, Veryl dabbles in basketball, high-intensity interval training, improv, nature, and the culinary arts.
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