The Legal Lens Podcast

224. Virginia Kase Solomón on the Work of Common Cause: Gerrymandering, Civic Engagement, and the Fight to Save Voting Rights 24.06.2026 41min

Angela Reddock-Wright sits down with Virginia Kase Solomón, President and CEO of Common Cause, for a wide-ranging conversation tracing the throughline from a deeply personal voting-rights story to the structural forces reshaping American democracy today. Solomón explains how her foster mother's experience facing discrimination at the voting polls in Hartford, Connecticut shaped a 30-plus-year career in civic engagement, and uses that lens to unpack the Supreme Court's Louisiana v. Callais decision, the wave of mid-cycle redistricting battles in Texas, California, and Alabama, and the outsized role money plays in elections since Citizens United. She closes with a practical voter-readiness checklist and a call for community-driven media literacy, framing this moment as one that requires sustained civic engagement rather than despair.

223. CA Assemblymember Sade Elhawary (D-57) on Wellness, Equity & Restorative Justice: The Keys to Building Sustainable Communities 17.06.2026 38min

In this episode of The Legal Lens, Angela Reddock‑Wright sits down with CA Assemblymember Sade Elhawary, an educator, organizer, foster mom, and first‑term representative for California’s 57th Assembly District, which includes South Central, Downtown LA, Skid Row, and Exposition Park. Sade shares how a spontaneous “I’m with the Blacks” speech at LA City Hall propelled her from organizing behind the scenes at the well-regarded community organization Community Coalition into elected office, and why she’s determined that her largely Black and Latino, working‑class district doesn’t just survive but truly thrives. She breaks down her “Safer Communities Through Opportunities Act” diversion bill, her push to end endless probation for youth, and the messy reality of negotiating with moderates, across the aisle, law enforcement, and the governor—while offering a candid look at what it really takes to move bold justice legislation and why she still loves the work.

222. Jenn Stowe on Championing the Rights and Dignity of Private Domestic Workers 10.06.2026 35min

In this episode of The Legal Lens, Angela Reddock‑Wright sits down with Jenn Stowe, executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) and head of Care in Action, to talk about how domestic workers are organizing for dignity, better working conditions, and real political power. Now based in Richmond, Virginia, Jenn shares her journey as the granddaughter of a domestic worker growing up in Atlanta, Georgia, and explains how honoring foremothers like her grandmother and Dorothy Bolden, the mother of the private domestic workers’ movement, fuels her fight for gender justice, immigrant rights, and Black women’s leadership. Through stories like that of Adriana—a former nanny turned full‑time organizer—Jenn shows how care workers are at the heart of our society and economy, and why people power and community are the antidotes to crisis.

221. Ashley Allison and Jasmine Browley on The Role of Black Media and the Importance of Telling Our Own Stories 03.06.2026 38min

In this episode of The Legal Lens, Angela Reddock‑Wright is joined by Ashley Allison—CNN commentator, publisher of The Root (originally founded by the renowned scholar Dr. Henry Louis Gates), and founder of Watering Hole Media—and Jasmine Browley, a Forbes contributor, former business editor at Essence, and writer and contributor with BET, to explore why Black‑owned and Black‑led media are essential in this political moment.

220. Part II: From Louisiana to CA: Attorneys Stephen King and Carmen‑Nicole Cox on Fighting Back After the SCOTUS Louisiana v. Callais Voting Rights Decision 20.05.2026 34min

In Part II of The Legal Lens series on the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision, Angela Reddock‑Wright is joined by Attorney Stephen King, civil‑rights trial lawyer and newly installed 50th president of the California Association of Black Lawyers (CABL), and Attorney Carmen‑Nicole Cox, “liberation attorney,” CABL boardmember, and 2026 CABL Lawyer of the Year. Building on the legal analysis from Part from guest Dr. T. Anansi WilsonI, they break down what it means to replace proof of discriminatory impact with proof of discriminatory intent under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, why “alarm bells should be ringing” about efforts to dismantle majority‑minority districts nationwide, and how similar tactics are already showing up in a California ballot initiative that could dilute Black voting power. They also share their personal “whys”—from Stephen’s experience fleeing a coup in Liberia to Carmen‑Nicole’s legal advocacy work after her father died in federal prison—and discuss how CABL and partner organizations plan to mobilize lawyers and communities in the wake of the Callais decision and ahead of the next election.

219. Part I: Voting Rights at Stake: Understanding the SCOTUS Decision in Louisiana v. Callais with Dr. T. Anansi Wilson 13.05.2026 38min

In Part I of this two‑part series on the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, Angela Reddock‑Wright is joined by returning guest Dr. T. Anansi Wilson—public defender, constitutional law scholar, and Supreme Court expert—to unpack how the Court’s 6–3 ruling reshapes the Voting Rights Act and minority political power. Dr. Wilson explains the structure and timing of the Supreme Court term, the concept of “opportunity seats”, why Louisiana’s refusal to add a second majority‑Black district matters, and how Justice Kagan’s forceful dissent contrasts with the majority’s opinion. They also connect the decision to a broader pattern of Voting Rights Act “gutting,” detailing how redistricting and racially polarized voting can dilute Black and Latino representation and, over time, push the United States back toward Jim Crow–era dynamics.

218. Attorney Elizabeth “Paige” White: “Movement Lawyering” and Representing Clients in Civil Rights, Criminal Defense, and High-Impact Cases 06.05.2026 36min

In this episode of The Legal Lens podcast, Angela Reddock‑Wright sits down with Attorney Elizabeth “Paige” White, a Washington, D.C.–based criminal defense and civil rights lawyer, to trace her journey from service‑oriented parents and an early sense of right and wrong to becoming a public defender, working with Attorney Ben Crump, and taking on high‑impact cases. Paige talks about how law school reshaped her view of the criminal legal system, why she left her initial dream of prosecution for public defense, and how working with Attorney Crump on cases like the Tyre Sampson and ASTROWORLD cases, along with excessive force and police‑brutality, hair‑relaxer mass tort, and class‑action sexual‑harassment litigation with other firms and her own firm, convinced her that one case can change a community and even the underlying policies that drive systemic change. She also reflects on what “movement lawyering” means today and offers practical encouragement to young Black lawyers who want to use the law in service of real change.

217. Lourdes Castro Ramírez on The State of Housing in Los Angeles & Beyond 29.04.2026 34min

In this episode of The Legal Lens, Angela Reddock‑Wright talks with Lourdes Castro Ramírez, President and CEO of the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles (HACLA) under the leadership of Mayor Karen Bass, which serves more than 200,000 residents and is the second‑largest public housing authority in the nation. As she explains, HACLA’s work rests on three core pillars: preventing people from falling into homelessness, providing and preserving stable affordable housing, and creating pathways to opportunity for the individuals and families it serves. Ramirez shares her journey as the eldest of nine children, immigrating from Mexico at age four, quickly becoming a language “bridge” and advocate for her parents and siblings, and discovering how responsive, accessible public institutions—and a stable place to call home—shape a person’s development and sense of purpose.

216. Twyla Carter: The Legal Aid Society Reimagining Justice in New York and Beyond 22.04.2026 38min

In this episode of The Legal Lens, Angela Reddock‑Wright talks with Twyla Carter, Attorney‑in‑Chief and CEO of the Legal Aid Society of New York City, the nation’s oldest and largest nonprofit public defense and civil legal‑services provider. Twyla shares what it means now to lead Legal Aid at a moment she describes as “the civil rights war of our lifetime.” Twyla also walks listeners through Legal Aid’s 150‑year legacy, from the Willowbrook case on abusive state institutions to current litigation over Rikers Island and the right to shelter, and closes with a powerful reminder that while other institutions may be “folding,” Legal Aid is “built for this” and not going anywhere.

215. Attorney Lauren Barnes on the Work of Public Justice: Litigation & Advocacy that Tackles the Biggest Systemic Threats to Justice in the U.S. 15.04.2026 37min

In this episode of The Legal Lens, Angela Reddock‑Wright talks with attorney Lauren Guth Barnes, Acting Chief Executive Officer of Public Justice, about her journey from complex and class action litigation against drug companies to leading a national legal‑advocacy organization focused on “unrigging” the civil justice system. Now, as acting CEO, she helps guide Public Justice’s work across its core advocacy areas—access to justice and fighting forced arbitration, abusive practices in the criminal legal system (including exploitative jail phone and video‑visitation policies), environmental and consumer protection, workers’ and students’ rights, and civil rights—while elevating the organization’s lawyers, communications professionals, development staff, and partners so their cases can expand the impact of the law and make the country better for everyone.

214. State of Black Women in California: Kellie Todd Griffin on Equity, Advocacy, and Change 01.04.2026 40min

In this episode of The Legal Lens, Angela Reddock‑Wright sits down with Kellie Todd Griffin, CEO of the California Black Women’s Collective Empowerment Institute, to talk about the resilience, joy, and systemic challenges facing Black women in California. Kellie shares her personal story—growing up with a single mother who navigated domestic violence, job instability, mental health struggles, and addiction, moving through eight schools for herself and ten for her brother—before passing away at 42 from undiagnosed diabetes. Motivated by her mother’s hardships, Kellie, joined by other leading California women, founded the Collective in 2018 with the first State of Black Women in California report, leading to a state‑funded think tank at Cal State Dominguez Hills and the Black Women’s Empowerment Institute in 2023. She celebrates how Black women “still smile, still laugh, still dance, still fellowship, still vote, and hold the culture down” amid inequities, and explains the Collective’s focus on total well‑being for Black women.

213. SEIU President April Verrett on Women in Labor and Building Power for Working People 25.03.2026 35min

In this episode of The Legal Lens, Angela Reddock‑Wright talks with April Verrett, President of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU)—one of North America’s largest unions representing more than 2 million workers—about her journey from growing up poor on the South Side of Chicago to leading a national labor movement. April shares how being raised by a grandmother who sometimes had to “rob Peter to pay Paul,” then calling Los Angeles and now Northeast D.C. home, grounded her commitment to workers who go to work every day and still struggle to make ends meet. As the first African American person to lead SEIU, she explains why she sees her life’s work as building organizations that build power for working people—especially women, people of color, and immigrants who are the backbone of the economy but too often shut out of the prosperity they create. April and Angela dig into why the labor movement should matter to everyone, what SEIU is fighting for now, and how a just society requires that all work and all workers are treated with dignity.

212. Angela Ferrell‑Zabala of Moms Demand Action on How Gun Violence Touches Every Community 18.03.2026 37min

In this episode of The Legal Lens, Angela Reddock‑Wright sits down with Angela Ferrell‑Zabala, Executive Director of Moms Demand Action, to talk about how a Facebook group born after the Sandy Hook massacre grew into one of the country’s most influential grassroots gun‑violence‑prevention movements. Ferrell-Zabala shares how, as a mother of four living in the D.C. region, watching gun violence devastate families—and knowing that more than half of adults in the United States have either experienced gun violence or have a loved one who has—pushed her to “get off the sidelines” and turn heartbreak into organizing. She walks listeners through Moms Demand Action’s origin story, its focus on common‑sense policy change and culture change, and why she believes this work is about protecting all children, families, and communities—not just her own.

211. Attorney Fatima Goss Graves on Title IX, Gender Justice, and The State of The #MeToo Movement 11.03.2026 36min

In this episode of The Legal Lens, Angela Reddock‑Wright sits down with Attorney Fatima Goss Graves, President and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center, to talk about gender justice and the enduring power of Title IX. Fatima explains how the Law Center, founded in 1972, works on multiple fronts—litigation, policy, and culture change—to defend reproductive freedom, support families struggling with caregiving and child care, and pursue justice in schools and workplaces. She breaks down how a law that’s just 37 words long became one of the most powerful tools against sex discrimination in education, covering everything from sexual harassment to inequitable sports programs, pregnant and parenting students, and barriers that keep women and girls out of certain fields. Fatima also traces the origins of Title IX and the Law Center in the wake of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, and shares how her team “guides and guards” Title IX today so that all students—no matter their gender—can truly access education “from the classroom to the field and beyond.” As a co-founder of the TIMES UP Legal Defense Fund, Fatima also discusses how the #MeToo movement has progressed over the last 10+ years and what the future holds.

210. Rooted, Ready, and Rising: President Nicole Austin‑Hillery on Leading the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation 04.03.2026 39min

In this episode of The Legal Lens, Angela Reddock‑Wright talks with attorney Nicole Austin‑Hillery, President and CEO of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation (CBCF), about her journey from growing up as a proud “project kid” in Harrisburg public housing to becoming a civil and human rights lawyer and leading a premier Black policy institution. She shares how her single mother and an eighth‑grade teacher helped shape her path, and how that calling now shows up in CBCF’s three pillars: building a pipeline of Black interns and fellows, producing Black‑centered policy research, and convening leaders and communities through its Annual Legislative Conference and new “mini ALCs.” Nicole and Angela also dig into CBCF’s priority issues—voting rights and civic power, health equity, and economic empowerment—along with tools like the executive order tracker and Black Public Policy Playbook, all under the foundation’s 50th‑anniversary theme, “Rooted, Ready, and Rising.”

209. Professor Jared Clemons on Whether Education Is Still The Great Equalizer in Black America 25.02.2026 41min

In this episode of The Legal Lens podcast, host Angela Reddock‑Wright sits down with Professor Jared Clemons, a political scientist whose work examines how race, power, and education intersect in American life. Jared and Angela talk about the pressures students face—from debt to anxiety about the future—and why some are turning toward entrepreneurship and even engineering and technology with an eye toward ethics and public responsibility, not just a paycheck. Drawing on Black political thought, Jared emphasizes the need to resist cynicism, insisting that nothing is inevitable, that “we all need each other,” and that recognizing our deep interdependence is essential to how we think about policy, education, and justice. He argues that this challenging moment is also an opening: if we can reframe our mindsets and the laws, ask better questions about who benefits from our current systems, and center hope over resignation, we can chart new directions for students, communities, and the broader social contract.

208. Lethal “Love”: Sunny Slaughter on the “Au Pair” Case and Reframing Domestic Violence and The Law 18.02.2026 37min

In this powerful return to The Legal Lens Show, host Angela Reddock-Wright welcomes returning guest Sunny Slaughter—litigation expert, national legal commentator on Court TV, CNN, and Law & Crime, and an authority on law enforcement and intimate partner violence—to challenge the way we talk about “crimes of passion” and domestic violence murder. Speaking on a breaking‑news day when a Virginia jury returned a first‑degree murder verdict in the high‑profile “au pair” case, Sunny explains why there is “nothing passionate about murder,” introduces her concept of L³: Lens, Language, and Law, and debuts a new framework she coined on air—Domestic Violence Murder by Ambush & Conspiracy(DVMAC)—to describe carefully planned, conspiratorial killings wrongly romanticized by the legal system’s language. Drawing on recent cases, including domestic homicides involving elaborate luring, lying in wait, and child endangerment, she unpacks how coercive control, narcissism, financial concerns, immigration status, and reputation operate as risk multipliers in intimate partner relationships, and why content creators, courts, and communities must “call it what it is,” reform statutes, and update how police, prosecutors, and the public understand and prevent escalating violence.

207. Professor Hasan Kwame Jeffries Celebrating Black History and the Modern Civil Rights Struggle 11.02.2026 39min

In this episode of The Legal Lens Show, host Angela Reddock-Wright talks with Professor Hasan Kwame Jeffries, a civil rights and history professor at The Ohio State University, author of Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt, editor of Understanding and Teaching the Civil Rights Movement, and host of the Teaching Hard History podcast, about how we remember and misremember Black freedom struggles—and what that means for the present. A Brooklyn native, Morehouse and Duke graduate, and younger brother of Democratic House Leader Hakeem Jeffries, he describes how growing up in Crown Heights in the 1980s amid the dawn of mass incarceration, the crack and AIDS epidemics, and parents who insisted that any vocation be “in service to the people” led him to use history as a lens to understand a world school never fully explained. Jeffries pushes back against the idea that the Civil Rights Movement is frozen in the 1950s and 1960s, arguing that while movements are intense but time-bound, Black struggle for freedom has been continuous—from abolition and mid‑century fights against Jim Crow to prison-based activism in the 1980s and today’s battles over policing, democracy, and education.

206. Attorney Deepak Gupta Civics 101: Reminding Us of the Role, Purpose & Inner Workings of the United States Supreme Court 04.02.2026 37min

In this episode of The Legal Lens Show, host Angela Reddock-Wright sits down with Deepak Gupta, one of the nation’s leading Supreme Court and appellate lawyers and founding principal of the Washington D.C. based public-interest firm Gupta Wessler LLP, to discuss how civil rights, civil liberties, and consumer protection are shaped at the highest court levels. Gupta shares how inspiration from Thurgood Marshall, the Civil Rights Movement, and his early work as a college debater and ACLU law student intern led him to a career focused on helping people access justice through the courts, even before a consistently conservative Supreme Court. He explains his firm’s focus on what they call the “law docket”—cases about jurisdiction, class actions, forced arbitration, securities fraud, and other technical issues that quietly govern whether consumers and workers can sue corporations where they live and were harmed, highlighting a unanimous Ford personal-jurisdiction decision and Monsanto PCB litigation in Washington State as examples of wins with broad community impact. Throughout the conversation, he underscores that fair access to lawyers, courts, and legal rules is “half the battle,” and shows how dedicated appellate advocacy can still produce meaningful victories that improve everyday people’s lives.

205. Texas Democratic Party Chairman Kendall Scudder on Why Texas State Politics and Redistricting Should Matter to the Whole Country 28.01.2026 40min

In this episode, host Angela Reddock-Wright talks with Kendall Scudder, Chair of the Texas Democratic Party, about why Texas state politics and redistricting are central to the nation’s future—even for listeners far outside the Lone Star State. Scudder traces Texas’s history as a former Democratic stronghold that powered some of America’s biggest progressive accomplishments—from the New Deal and Great Society to putting a man on the moon and producing the last balanced federal budget—and explains how losing Texas meant losing the party’s “steel backbone.” He walks through the state’s current political landscape: Texas ranking 47th in voter turnout, the enormous number of non-voters who could swing elections, and the high-stakes redistricting fights that pushed Texas legislators to break quorum in 2025 to block extreme maps.