Struggling to balance the responsibilities of a full-time job, school, and teaching at a non-profit in her community, Diana began to fall behind in her first year of law school. Desperate for extra study time and hoping to reinforce the material for herself, she started teaching the first-year law course curriculum she was learning to the pre-college students she taught on the weekends. Not only did she pass her courses, she discovered that her students were gaining an impressive understanding of the law. Better still, they were using it effectively to navigate their worlds. She would hear examples of them deploying contract law at the bodega and property law in their family’s tenant-landlord issues.

Her non-profit organization, Defying Legal Gravity, was born from this accidental pilot. DLG democratizes the law and builds the power of communities to know, use, and shape the law by teaching the foundational first-year law school curriculum to NYC youth. On Saturdays throughout the academic year, Diana’s high-school-aged students take the required legal courses studied by every lawyer in America. The legal understanding derived from these courses gives young people an access key to the world, enabling them to become immediate advocates for justice in their communities. Eventually, Diana wants DLG to become the cornerstone of a broader legal-literacy movement, shortening the distance between everyday New Yorkers and real legal knowledge, and providing tools for communities to understand, navigate, and shape the law itself.