Book Event: Killing Justice – Kelly Giles in conversation with Jody David Armour

Kelly Giles obtained his Juris Doctor Degree from Pepperdine University School of Law in 1989. He practiced U.S. immigration law for twenty three years, until late 2012, and continues to practice Canadian immigration law. He self-published his Darwin’s Desert trilogy of poetry books between 2010 and 2012, Swimming in a Thunderstorm, Surfing the Tsunami and Surrendering to Transcendence.  In 2014, he gave a talk entitled “Heart Surgery for the Legal Profession” to a class of USC Law Professor Jody Armour’s criminal law students related to his then upcoming memoir. For the past ten years, he has been a member of Aim for the Heart’s Microphone Sessions and Heart Sessions poetry and hip-hop workshops, founded by Tupac Shakur’s manager Leila Steinberg in 1996. He currently lives in Culver City, California, volunteers with Amnesty International, Reverb and Headcount, and is a member of UCLA Extension's Writer's Program Now, Film Independent, and NewFilmMakers LA. Killing Justice is his debut memoir.

Jody David Armour is the Roy P. Crocker Professor of Law at the University of Southern California. A widely published scholar and popular lecturer, he studies the intersection of race, law, morality, psychology, politics, ordinary language philosophy, and the performing arts. His latest book, N*gga Theory: Race, Language, Unequal Justice, and the Law (Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2020) looks at America’s criminal justice system – among the deadliest and most racist in the world – through deeply interdisciplinary lenses.  His latest free speech article is titled "Law, Language, and Politics," 22 University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law 1073 (2020).  Armour is a Soros Justice Senior Fellow of The Open Society Institute’s Center on Crime, Communities & Culture, and he is on the Board of Directors for LEAP (Law Enforcement Action Partnership), an international 501(c)(3) non-profit of police, prosecutors, judges, corrections officials, and other law enforcement officials advocating for criminal justice reform.