Viveca Burnette
Class of 2024
Law
Health law, international human rights/immigration law, family law
Involvement
Three ways in which I support the SU Law community are:
- Internal advocacy on behalf of students as both a member of the law school’s DEI Committee and as the Faculty Standards Representative on the Student Bar Association. When conversations happen around supporting meaningful diversity, beneficial inclusive practices, tangible equity, and ultimately justice within SU’s walls, representation matters.
- External advocacy by being volunteering with Columbia Legal Services and the WSBA’s Moderate Means Program to provide support and assistance to persons who have been disaffected by the established legal system, and the various “isms” that prevent access to justice.
- Strategizing for the future by being a member of Law Review. Legal institutions like Law Review have remained non-diverse, and so most of the publications, whether by design or accident, have been used as supporting materials for decisions that have unfortunately only served, in some instances, to further marginalize certain communities, and this needs to change.
Passion
Privilege imposes responsibility. Between my mother and Catholic school, I was raised with the understanding that service is a requirement – you act and do instead of thinking about acting and doing. And when you have access, service to the community becomes even more imperative because not everyone has the benefit of the platform that you occupy. As a Black female immigrant with Hispanic heritage, who is armed with the understanding of the havoc that discrimination has created and continues to generate every day in peoples' lives, my voice is one that is necessary to fueling conversations about intersectionality and what justice can look like in certain spaces.
This focus is particularly important for persons from historically marginalized groups, BIPOCs especially, who are underrepresented within the legal profession, and whose experiences within law school and with the law are dissimilar to their non-POC counterparts.