In this episode of Our WellSpring, we sit down with Rachel López, James E. Beasley Professor of Law at Temple University, to explore what it means to reimagine legal scholarship—and justice itself—through a human rights lens.

Rachel shares her unexpected journey into the legal academy, her early awakening to global injustice, and her belief that the law becomes most powerful when informed by diverse vantage points—including those with lived experience of legal systems’ failures.

She introduces us to Participatory Law Scholarship (PLS), a groundbreaking approach that centers the voices of those without formal legal training but with profound expertise in the law’s inequities. Through her work, Rachel is not only reframing who is seen as a legal thinker but also advocating for a more compassionate and just legal system—one that recognizes people’s capacity for change and affirms the right to redemption.

This conversation invites us to expand our definition of scholarship, leadership, and justice—and to imagine a future where the law reflects both accountability and humanity.

Guest/s
Rachel López is the James E. Beasley Professor of Law at Temple Law. She has also held visiting fellowships at research institutions around the world, including at the Harvard Kennedy School, Yale Law School, University of Cambridge, Princeton University, and the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, and been a Fulbright Scholar in Guatemala and Spain.

She is a recognized expert in criminal law, human rights law, and public international law. She is a Special Advisor of the Latin American and Caribbean Law Council for the American Bar Association. 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.

Her most recent research critically examines the carceral state from a human rights perspective.She is also pioneering a new genre of legal scholarship called Participatory Law Scholarship (PLS), which is written in collaboration with authors who have no formal legal training, but rather expertise in law’s injustice through lived experience. One of these works, Redeeming Justice, was awarded the 2022 Law and Society Association Article Prize. In 2024, the Virginia Law Review selected PLS as the theme of their Sixth Annual Symposium.

Our WellSpring Host
Uva Coles, Chief Learning Officer

Uva Coles serves as Chief Learning Officer for Spring Point Partners. As the organization's external communications and learning steward, Uva’s leadership ensures that inclusion, human-centered leadership, and narrative change are woven through every aspect of SPP’s partner-based learning deliveries. A writer, speaker, inclusive organizational strategist, and lifelong learner, Uva believes every room we step into is a classroom. Sometimes we are teachers; but always, we are students.

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