In a brown bag interview on Friday, Valerie Jarrett, Chicago native and formerly a senior adviser to President Barack Obama, addressed University of Chicago Law School students as the keynote speaker in an annual student-run symposium.

This year titled “Law in the Era of #MeToo,” the event brought in legal scholars from around the city and country to discuss how the movement falls at the intersection of law and culture. The goal was to both educate students and advance the conversation by bringing together an ideologically diverse group of law professors.

“We realized there was nothing better to illustrate the way that the law intersects with the lives of real people in society,” said Briana Goncalves, a third-year law student and the symposium’s editor.

Goncalves explained how The Legal Forum, the law school’s student-edited journal that hosted the event, tries to select a topic relevant to a current cultural or social phenomena.

“The #MeToo movement is, in a lot of ways, a cultural reaction to a rather inadequate legal regime,” she said, “and because this has remained so salient in the public discourse, we felt it was really necessary to bring the conversation to the law school.”

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