The Fall 2025 Friel-Scanlan Lecture No Justice for Us Without Us: Participatory Law, Lived Realities, and the Making of Transformative Legal Futures

She is a recognized expert in criminal law, human rights law, and public international law. She currently serves on the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law. From 2015 to 2019, she served as a Commissioner on the Pennsylvania Sentencing Commission, as an appointee of then Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf. Professor López recently joined leading human rights experts as a co-author of the first law school textbook focused on domestic human rights in the United States. She received her B.A. from Northwestern University and J.D. from the University of Texas, School of Law. She also has an LL.M. in French and European Law from Université Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne. 

She left her home and her teaching career and enrolled in a graduate program at the University of Montana. Her work in Conservation and Development focuses on the intersection of spiritually-based conservation/traditional ecological knowledge and the justice system. She is working on just relations between people and planet, strengthening communal bonds to each other and the land/water, the salutogenic effects of green and blue space, and how environmental stewardship can be used as violence prevention and alternative sentencing. Her thesis is titled Reciprocal Healing because stewardship and connection heal both Mother Earth and humanity. Nick remains her North Star.

While behind bars, Terrell Woolfolk was a hospice volunteer, and authored three published novels, several short stories, poems, and personal essays. He also co-authored articles published by Northwestern Law Review and in Columbia University’s Law Review Forum. He is a co-creator of Writing Through The Walls, a writing exchange program consisting of men who are incarcerated in a state prison outside of Philadelphia. He is also a facilitator and creator of several workshops ranging in topics from creative writing to social justice issues. He is a graduate of Villanova and currently pursuing a master’s in creative writing at Drexel University. He is an active member of the Inside/Out Think Tank, and a husband, father, and grandfather. Mr. Woolfolk has dedicated his life towards bringing an end to the inhumane practice of condemning men, women, and children to die in prison, and to restore hope in those who have had it stripped away. 

He is also a founding member of Right to Redemption, the Redemption Project, and the Coalition to Abolish Death By Incarceration (CADBI), as well as a co-founder and director of Ubuntu Philadelphia. Since his release in 2017 after thirty years in prison – starting when he was 15 years old – Ghani has emerged as an outspoken voice and visionary in Philadelphia’s movement to end mass human caging and to create transformative and restorative responses to harm and violence. During his first three years out, he worked as the Healing Justice Organizer for the Amistad Law Project (ALP), during which time he co-created and hosted ALP’s “Move It Forward” podcast. Ghani spent another three years at the Youth Art & Self-empowerment Project (YASP) as leader of Philadelphia’s first Restorative Justice Diversion program for youth called Healing Futures.