Purvi Shah

2018 Black Male Achievement Fellow
Founder of Movement Law Lab

Bold Idea

Build power in black and brown communities by incubating legal projects that combine law and community organizing to protect, defend, and embolden racial justice movements.

Multi Media

SUMMARY

Movement Law Lab is building a new generation of legal visionaries to tackle America's toughest racial justice challenges: economic inequality, immigration, mass incarceration, and climate change. Movement Law Lab helps entrepreneurial lawyers by sharing brilliant ideas about how law can build the power of social movements, get their ventures off the ground, and grow to scale. The Movement Law Lab incubator provides legal innovators with seed funding, training, coaching, and community to launch their projects. The goal is to steward a new generation of dynamic, collaborative, and versatile legal organizations with the know-how and expertise to use law to transform the world.

EXPERIENCE

Purvi Shah, an experienced racial justice lawyer, founded Movement Law to seed a new generation of legal problem-solvers to tackle America's toughest racial justice challenges. One of the nation's premier thinkers on law and social movements, Purvi has been training, teaching, mobilizing, and inspiring young movement lawyers for over a decade. She is co-founder of Law For Black Lives, a national network of 3,400 lawyers founded in the aftermath of the Ferguson uprisings to support the growing Movement For Black Lives. From 2012 to 2016, Purvi directed the Bertha Justice Institute at the Center for Constitutional Rights, where she trained thousands on movement lawyering and built a global network of movement lawyers in sixteen countries. Purvi started her legal career litigating on behalf of taxi drivers, tenant unions, public housing residents, and immigrants. Purvi has won many awards for her work, including a Soros Equality Fellowship, Harvard Law School Wasserstein Fellowship, and a New Voices Fellowship. She is a graduate of Northwestern University and the Berkeley School of Law at the University of California.