A diverse group of young adults standing on a staircase with a glass railing in a modern building.
Diana Imbert-Hodges ’19 (bottom, center) and Craig Shepherd ’19 (bottom, right) with their students at Fordham Law School

Teaching Teens the Power of the Law

Teaching Teens the Power of the Law
Defying Legal Gravity, a nonprofit started by Diana Imbert-Hodges ’19 and Craig Shepherd ’19, teaches New York City high schoolers to fall in love with the law—and empowers communities along the way.
By Paula Derrow | Photos by chris taggart
E

very Saturday morning at 10 a.m., 20 students file into Room 4-08 at Fordham Law School to learn the fundamentals of a legal education— contract law, constitutional law, torts, civil procedure, criminal law, and property law—and receive an introduction to critical race theory and civics and government. It’s a formidable curriculum, one that comes with its own language and way of thinking, as any 1L knows.

Except the students in Room 4-08 aren’t 1Ls at all. They are high schoolers from all five boroughs of New York City who are part of a program called Defying Legal Gravity, a nonprofit started in 2022 by Fordham Law graduates and classmates Diana Imbert-Hodges ’19 and Craig Shepherd ’19.

Many of the students, young as they are, have experienced the legal system in a personal—and largely negative—way. Some are the children of undocumented immigrants. Others have incarcerated parents. Many come from under-resourced communities where their neighbors have no idea how to use the law to their benefit.

Imbert-Hodges and Shepherd can empathize with the students. “I am a first-generation American—my father was trained as a physician in the Dominican Republic, but when we came here, he took a job in a factory in the Bronx and gave up his dream of being a doctor for my sisters and me,” says Imbert-Hodges. “Growing up, I had to do a lot of legal things for my parents, whether reading leases or getting them government benefits.”

The law also touched Shepherd’s life in stressful ways, long before he was a student at Fordham Law. “My father was incarcerated during my childhood,” says Shepherd. “He was a big cheerleader for me going to law school.”

A woman presenting in a classroom setting with a man at a podium beside her.

An Idea Whose Time Had Come

While studying at Fordham Law, Imbert-Hodges and Shepherd both hit upon the notion of creating a program that would help kids learn to better advocate for themselves and their communities by learning the basics of law. Though they shared a common vision, they started from different perspectives.

For Shepherd, the seeds of Defying Legal Gravity came to him when he was a 3L and participating in the Black Law Students Association’s Youth Law Day. “We invited local middle school kids to campus. That’s when it struck me that it would be a good idea to expose teens who had been more directly impacted by the law to the fundamentals of a legal education—specifically, those who’d had incarcerated parents,” he recalls.

As for Imbert-Hodges, she got her first experience teaching kids the law almost by accident, when, during her first year in law school, she found herself struggling to keep up her grades as she juggled working two jobs: the first as a medical researcher and the second teaching seventh graders at an enrichment program in Harlem. In lieu of quitting the teaching program to focus on her law studies, she got the idea of introducing the kids to the legal concepts she was learning at Fordham during her 1L year. “I figured it would be like extra study time for me,” she says.

What she wasn’t expecting was her students’ hunger—and aptitude—for the material. “One of my seventh graders used the principles of contract law to justify not paying for an order at a local deli that the counter person kept getting wrong. The power of that experience stayed in my mind,” says Imbert-Hodges, who now works as a staff attorney at Advocates for Children of New York.

Rezwan Ahmed, 18, who graduated from Defying Legal Gravity’s most recent 2024 class, began exercising his power only a few weeks into the program—he was that fired up by what he was learning. “My parents emigrated from Bangladesh,” he says. “I was interested in the program because I have friends who are undocumented, and they’re persecuted by their employers—often, they’re paid less than minimum wage.”

During the program, which runs from September until April, with a graduation ceremony capping off the one-year session for each cohort, Ahmed turned his attention to those concerns—and took action. “Some friends and I created pamphlets for immigrants letting them know about their rights, and we began passing them out to people in neighborhoods with a high immigrant population,” Ahmed says. “People should be taught what rights they have; we shouldn’t have to search for them online. Ideally, we’d all be learning this stuff, from elementary school on.”

"There's always a moment for me when I realize the impact we're having."
–Diana Imbert-Hodges ’19
A young man with short dark hair and headphones around his neck gestures with both hands while speaking.
A young woman with curly brown hair and hoop earrings smiles as she looks over her shoulder in a classroom setting.
Three students are attentively looking towards the front of a light blue classroom while seated at individual light brown desks. The foreground shows a young woman with wavy brown hair in a purple and blue cardigan, with another student with curly dark hair resting her chin on her hand to her left.
Ahmed’s reaction doesn’t surprise Imbert-Hodges. “There’s always a moment for me when I realize the impact we’re having,” she says. “One of our students, a girl named Edith in our inaugural class at Fordham Law, told us that her mother had been badly bitten by a dog and had gone into debt because she didn’t have health insurance. Her mother didn’t realize that she could bring a tort action for payment of that debt. But Edith helped her bring a pro se civil complaint against the dog’s owner and recovered the money she owed. Every Saturday, we see these kinds of little miracles.”

Students have also applied what they’ve learned about the Equal Protection Clause in their Constitutional Law course to address inequities in their schools, such as unequal funding, and challenged discriminatory practices using legal principles. Many have also been inspired to get involved in student government to advocate for meaningful change.

As an example, Imbert-Hodges recalls a student named Chloe who graduated from the program in April, “She lived with her grandmother in public housing, and for weeks, they had no heat or utilities during the winter. So she applied what she learned in Property Law and Civil Procedure, helping her grandmother file a formal complaint with the New York City Housing Authority.”

When another student’s landlord attempted to evict her family from their rent-stabilized apartment, “she reviewed the lease with her parents, line by line, and discovered that the landlord’s claims were invalid,” says Imbert-Hodges. She went on to connect her family with a tenant advocacy organization, and together, they successfully fought the eviction and remained in their home.

A Safe Space for Debate

Besides gaining legal knowledge, Ahmed also appreciated that Room 4-08 was a “safe space” where he could talk about current hot-button political issues. “That’s not something we were allowed to do in my history class at high school,” he acknowledges. He also loved being matched with a mentor, an attorney at White & Case LLP, who showed him around the law firm office and talked with him about lawyering life. “It’s rare that you can get the details about what it’s really like to be a lawyer, and know what lawyers actually do,” he says. The experience only reinforced his desire to go to law school one day.

Those kinds of reactions thrill Defying Legal Gravity’s founders—though their goal is not necessarily to put more lawyers into the world.

“We don’t think of Defying Legal Gravity as a legal pipeline,” explains Shepherd, who worked for Common Justice after Fordham and is now working full-time for Defying Legal Gravity on a volunteer basis as well as for Food With Fam, another nonprofit he founded to provide free, quality groceries to individuals and families in need. “Our goal is to create a pathway to legal empowerment.”

A young woman with dark hair pulled back in a ponytail actively participates in a classroom discussion, raising one hand and gesturing with the other as she speaks. Another student with long dark hair sits to her left, listening attentively in the bright, blurred background of the classroom.
"It's rare that you can get the details about what it's really like to be a lawyer, and know what lawyers actually do."
–Rezwan Ahmed, GABELLI ’28
A young woman with long dark hair and glasses smiles broadly, looking off to the side while holding a smartphone in her left hand. She is wearing a light-colored sweater and a small earring, seated behind a light brown partition.
A young man with dark, curly hair and glasses rests his chin on his hand, looking intently towards the left in a classroom setting. Two other students are visible in the blurred background, seated at desks in front of a window with blue and white reflections.
A bearded man with dark skin stands in front of a whiteboard covered in handwritten notes about the "Equal Protection Clause," gesturing with his hands as if explaining the content. He is wearing a black zip-up sweater and gray pants in a classroom setting.
A young woman with dark hair pulled back in a ponytail actively participates in a classroom discussion, raising one hand and gesturing with the other as she speaks. Another student with long dark hair sits to her left, listening attentively in the bright, blurred background of the classroom.
"It's rare that you can get the details about what it's really like to be a lawyer, and know what lawyers actually do."
–Rezwan Ahmed, GABELLI ’28
A young woman with long dark hair and glasses smiles broadly, looking off to the side while holding a smartphone in her left hand. She is wearing a light-colored sweater and a small earring, seated behind a light brown partition.
A young man with dark, curly hair and glasses rests his chin on his hand, looking intently towards the left in a classroom setting. Two other students are visible in the blurred background, seated at desks in front of a window with blue and white reflections.

It Takes a (Fordham) Village

Imbert-Hodges and Shepherd eventually melded their nascent ideas when Lena Widdy ’19, a mutual friend and Fordham Law classmate, said to Shepherd, “You and Diana need to talk!” Recalls Shepherd, “Diana told me her vision for teaching law to teens, and I said, ‘That’s brilliant! I have that exact group of kids in mind.’”

The two began building out their concept, albeit in the midst of graduating from Fordham, studying for the bar, and taking their first post–law school jobs. “We kept refining our mission and vision,” says Shepherd. Then COVID-19 happened in March of 2020, causing further delays. “We had to keep pivoting, then pivoting again.”

One thing they knew for sure: “We needed to be having the right conversations with the right contacts to help guide us so that we could take our idea for the program from our hearts and minds out into the universe,” says Shepherd.

Besides the help and advice of a number of administrators, deans, and professors at Fordham, the duo turned to Tanya Hernández, Archibald R. Murray Professor of Law and associate director of Fordham’s Center on Race, Law and Justice. Hernández, says Imbert-Hodges, had a huge impact on both of them when each took her class on critical race theory. “Craig is Black; I’m Latina,” says Imbert-Hodges. “If you come from communities that have been disenfranchised, sitting in a classroom and hearing the law taught in a race-neutral way can feel almost offensive. Professor Hernández taught us that looking at law through the lens of race can help us get to better solutions that feel more equitable to everyone.”

Imbert-Hodges and Shepherd made an equally strong impression on Hernández, who was the first person the two asked to join Defying Legal Gravity’s board. “I still remember how excited Craig and Diana were about the ideas they were learning in class,” says Hernández. “I also remember Diana telling me about her experience teaching seventh graders critical race theory—she didn’t even repackage the information, but the young scholars were able to absorb it and make it their own. And who better to appreciate what the law can offer than children in urgent need of these kinds of interventions? Still, never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that middle schoolers would find this information so useful.”

A young woman with long, dark hair and light brown skin looks slightly upward and to the right, her mouth slightly open as if speaking or listening intently. She is wearing a dark top and a delicate necklace, seated against a light blue and beige background.
In a tiered classroom, a student wearing a bright blue, embellished hijab and glasses gestures with her hands while looking towards the right. Two other students are visible in the foreground and background, also appearing engaged in the classroom activity.
A young woman with dark, wavy hair styled with a small braid smiles and looks to her right, her hands clasped near her chin in a thoughtful or amused expression. She is wearing a dark jacket and a bracelet, seated in a classroom with light brown tiered seating.
Standing before a white board, a presenter with dark hair and a denim outfit uses open hand gestures as if lecturing or engaging an audience. A laptop with an Apple logo, a black water bottle, and a dark bag rest on the table in the foreground, suggesting a classroom or presentation setting.
The Center on Race, Law and Justice also developed a close and continuing relationship with the students in the program by, among other things, ensuring they would have space on campus. The Center’s executive director, Zenande Booi, who occasionally guest-teaches in the program, offers students a global perspective by drawing links with constitutional rights and law in South Africa and international human rights law.

Ultimately, much of the program’s impact is due to the fact that Imbert-Hodges and Shepherd have been where these very students are today—which is one reason the two find their students’ enthusiasm so gratifying. “Sometimes, after working at Common Justice all week, I’d feel mentally and physically exhausted,” says Shepherd. “But then I’d show up in Room 4-08 to teach, and when the kids arrived, they’d flip my energy level on its head.”

On any given Saturday, the co-teachers take that energy and run with it, mixing up the typically dense 1L curriculum with classroom debates, mock negotiation sessions, and, always, lively discussions, sparked by guest speakers such as their Fordham Law classmate Lauren Gorab ’19, an associate at White & Case LLP, as well as Hernández. “Being with these young scholars,” says Hernández, “gives me a whole new perspective on what I’ve been teaching all along.”

For Ahmed’s part, he loved the fact that learning the law didn’t have to feel dry or rote. “Whatever we were covering, whether trademark law or land use, we weren’t just being lectured to or memorizing terms,” says Ahmed, who is now a freshman at Fordham University’s Gabelli School of Business.

Not that the creative teaching skills always came easily. “Frankly, I was scared at first,” admits Shepherd. “When we started out, I felt like I was coming in blind, a year and a half out of law school, teaching kids the law. I definitely had imposter syndrome.”

He got over it quickly. “Diana reminded me not to underestimate the kids’ brilliance and appetite for learning.”

"Being with these young scholars gives me a whole new perspective on what I've been teaching all along."
–Professor Tanya Hernández
A smiling woman in a denim jumpsuit and a man in a dark sweater and gray pants stand on a modern staircase with metal railings. The woman is on a lower step looking towards the camera, while the man stands a few steps above her, also smiling.
To keep feeding those appetites, Imbert-Hodges and Shepherd are busy planning for the future. To date, the organization has relied on grassroots funding, grants, and foundation support. According to Shepherd, a critical next step is increasing fundraising to expand the work of Defying Legal Gravity. First on the agenda: expanding the number of students in the program, given that the most recent session drew 250 applications for only 20 spots. “It hurts my heart to have to say ‘no’ to so many promising kids,” says Imbert-Hodges. She and Shepherd also want to integrate more opportunities for students to gain hands-on experience in the law, perhaps by connecting them with lawyers from Legal Aid and public defenders’ offices.

Many are already doing this kind of work on their own, says Imbert-Hodges. “We see them using their knowledge to assist their families and communities beyond the foundational curriculum,” she says, whether helping parents navigate red tape and permits to save their small businesses or guiding them through the process of reinstating SNAP benefits.

Adds Shepherd, “After every class, and every story, I walk away feeling, ‘Wow! This is an incredible way to spend a Saturday.’ There’s really nothing I’d rather be doing.”

Meanwhile, the reverberations from the energy in room 4-08 continue to ripple out into the world beyond: “Our big dream is to see a more legally literate society,” says Imbert-Hodges. “We’re doing our best to lead a movement.”

Back to Full Issue
Table of Contents