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