CLEAR and WorldBoston Welcome Global Delegation to Discuss Rule of Law and the US Justice System

04.15.25—Northeastern University School of Law’s Center for Law, Equity and Race (CLEAR) in partnership with WorldBoston, hosted 24 delegates from the US Department of State’s 2025 International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) on February 26, 2025. The group of international delegates came from all around the world to learn about the criminal and civil systems of justice under the United States’ structure of federalism. This IVLP delegation program was titled “Rule of Law and the US Judicial System.” The delegates traveled across the country to hear from experts in the field. The Boston portion was led by presentations from Northeastern Law’s Professor Rose Zoltek-Jick, associate director of CLEAR’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project (CRRJ), and Professor Deborah Ramirez, CLEAR faculty co-director. These presentations sparked engaging dialogue on what the rule of law involves and its integral impact in our justice system. 

Ramirez discussed her work with Massachusetts Criminal Justice Support Centers (CJSC), which assist formerly incarcerated individuals with re-entry and recidivism. Ramirez’s work, which started in collaboration with her late husband, Massachusetts Chief Justice Ralph Gants, has one goal: to reduce recidivism through providing state-funded re-entry services. Over the last 30 years, she has worked to expand the public benefit services and critical programming these centers offer statewide. In consultation with many judges throughout Massachusetts, her work has ensured that more individuals are redirected at the pretrial stage to CJSCs for resources and programming. This has provided justice-involved individuals access to necessary resources to address the underlying problems that may have led them to offend. 

“Judges should be problem solvers, instead of case processors,” said Ramirez.  

Professor Zoltek-Jick introduced the IVLP delegation to the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project’s Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive. MIT Chancellor Melissa Nobles, and Professor Margaret Burnham, head of CRRJ and faculty co-director of CLEAR, began years ago independently collecting material on cases of anti-Black homicide that were outside of the scope of the Emmett Till Act. As they searched newspapers for contemporary reports on these older cold cases, it became clear that there were hundreds of incidents that had never been investigated. 

What started as a rather scattered effort to investigate these incidents and work with the affected families eventually became the nationally recognized Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, which relies on Northeastern Law students in the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Clinic to research and collect data on racially motivated killings of Black people in the Jim Crow South. Since 2009, these incidents have been investigated by law students, graduate students in journalism and public history, and undergraduates. The Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive was launched in 2022 to house this extensive and unparalleled research. 

Following these presentations, the meeting was opened up to a Q&A with all the delegates, who shared their countries’ experiences with breaches of the rule of law, providing an opportunity for cross-cultural conversations and connections. With help from the staff at Northeastern Crossing, a venue for authentic exchange between the on-campus community and the off-campus community, this event provided a meaningful dialogue to support the State Department’s mission of international exchange.