Seema Gajwani is the Next Speaker in the Mudd Lecture Series Seema Gajwani, a special counsel for juvenile justice reform at the D.C. Office of the Attorney General, will give a lecture on Feb. 9 at 5 p.m.
Seema Gajwani, a special counsel for juvenile justice reform at the D.C. Office of the Attorney General, will present a lecture on Feb. 9 at 5 p.m. in the University Chapel as part of Washington and Lee University’s Mudd Center for Ethics’ series on “Beneficence: Practicing and Ethics of Care.”
Gajwani’s lecture, which is free and open to the public, is titled “Restorative vs Adversarial Justice: A New Paradigm for Addressing Crime and Conflict.” This event can also be accessed via Livestream.
Gajwani is an advocate for restorative justice practices. Restorative justice involves repairing harm and rebuilding relationships in the community. Her work is about reconciling those affected by a crime, including the victim, offender and other community members, by bringing them together to participate in a reconciliatory process, usually with the help of a facilitator.
Gajwani earned a bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University and a law degree from the New York University School of Law. During her time in law school, she interned at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the King County Defender Association in Seattle and the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana. Her career began in the D.C. Public Defender Service as a trial attorney; later, she ran the Criminal Justice Program at the Public Welfare Foundation in Washington, D.C. in a position where she focused on improving criminal and juvenile justice systems across the country, with an emphasis on pretrial detention reform and prosecutorial culture change.
Gajwani’s career has addressed criminal justice from multiple viewpoints. In 2019, she was selected to be an Obama Foundation Fellow for her work.
The Mudd Center was established in 2010 through a gift to Washington and Lee from award-winning journalist Roger Mudd, a 1950 graduate of the university. By facilitating collaboration across traditional institutional boundaries, the center aims to encourage a multidisciplinary perspective on ethics informed by theory and practice. Previous Mudd Center lecture series topics have included Race and Justice in America, The Ethics of Citizenship, Markets and Morals, Equality and Difference, The Ethics of Identity, and The Ethics of Technology.
For more information and a complete schedule of events, visit the series webpage.
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