Abolition Advocacy Project
Expanding the Legal Imagination. Demanding Collective Liberation.
AAP is an advocacy initiative aimed at building the intellectual, strategic, and community infrastructure needed to dismantle the carceral state, and usher in a renewed and unified abolitionist movement. We are committed to creating an interdisciplinary network of movement-minded lawyers, students, teachers, healthcare professionals, organizers, community leaders, and artists.
Our Story
Abolition Advocacy Project (AAP) was founded at Georgetown University Law Center in 2024 by first-year law students and justice advocates Brittany Lovely, Mari Latibashvili, and Caitlin Holbrook. The three students entered their first years of law school looking for an abolitionist community actively involved with the movement for liberation, and when they did not find one, they decided to create it themselves. As a law student organization, AAP sought to bring direct advocacy campaigns to students while they were in law school, to close the gap between the law school campus and the broader District of Columbia abolitionist community, and to integrate abolitionist teachings into the law school curriculum.
Georgetown Law AAP took on many projects in its first two years, including leading the creation of a campus-wide anti-fascist coalition of organizations, drafting legislation for the D.C. City Council, campaigning against Georgetown’s contract with food conglomerate Aramark, providing students with actionable ways to engage in Congressional and City legislative advocacy, and, most importantly, helping legitimize abolition as a widely accepted praxis amongst the Georgetown legal community.
As Co-Founders Brittany Lovely and Mari Latibashvili end their tenure at Georgetown Law, they are expanding this idea by establishing Abolition Advocacy Project as a national project which will run a brand-new publication: Abolition Law & Policy Review. Joining in this launch is Freedom Gobel, a third-year law student at Georgetown and the newest member of AAP.
Our Mission and Vision
AAP was founded as a law student organization in support of the movement for the abolition of all institutions that are built on and perpetuate systemic injustices. Primarily our focus was on the abolition of all prisons and police in the United States, and the legal systems that uphold them. As a law student organization this was done through direct advocacy campaigns, working alongside local movement efforts, and educating law students.
As a national project our mission has not changed — just expanded. We have and will always aim to challenge the status quo, lawyer through an abolitionist lens, and engage with our communities through coalition building, collaboration, and grassroots organizing. The advocacy initiative is building the intellectual, strategic, and community infrastructure needed to dismantle the carceral state, and usher in a renewed and unified abolitionist movement. AAP is committed to creating an interdisciplinary network of movement-minded lawyers, students, scholars, teachers, organizers, and artists — knowing that siloed efforts of resistance enable the perpetuation of the status quo.
We remain grounded in the belief that the law can be a site of transformation when oriented towards care, restoration, and healing — not profit, control and punishment. Our values of anti-racism, justice, and equity guide us. We strive to create an inclusive and just society where the law makes us all safe and free, regardless of race, gender, ability, education, nationality, religion, sexuality, incarceration, socioeconomic or immigration status, or any other identity marker. We believe how every person ought to be treated and what every person owes to one another is not and cannot be contingent upon what someone may or may not have done or who someone may or may not be.
Meet The Team
Brittany Lovely
AAP Founder, ALPR Editor-in-Chief & Content Curator
Brittany Lovely is a formerly incarcerated advocate committed to dismantling the carceral state and capitalist systems of control and replacing them with systems rooted in care and community. Drawing on her lived experience and years of policy and reentry work, she approaches law as a site of transformation and a tool for justice.
Brittany is a 2026 Juris Doctor Candidate at Georgetown Law, where she is an Opportunity Scholar, RISE Fellow, and NAACP Legal Defense Fund Herbert Lehman Scholar. She is Co-Founder and Co-President of the Abolition Advocacy Project (AAP). She also founded and leads Caregiver Advocates for Resources & Equity (CARE), which advocates for and supports parenting and caregiving students throughout their law school journey. As Diversity Liaison for the Student Bar Association, she works to embed accessibility, inclusion, and racial justice into the institution’s infrastructure and culture. This year, she serves as a Student Attorney in the Appellate Litigation Clinic, representing clients in federal appeals.
Prior to law school, Brittany served as staff to Governor Inslee’s Washington Statewide Reentry Council, shaping reentry and decarceration policy across the state. Additionally, she led multiple state level policy coalitions, successfully introducing and passing legislation to eliminate collateral consequences of incarceration, and consulted for community and governmental partners on justice and reentry initiatives. Her work centers the conviction that abolition is both a theory and a practice—an ongoing project of rebuilding the world beyond punishment.
Mari Latibashvili
AAP Founder &
ALPR Content Curator
Mari Latibashvili is a proud immigrant, justice advocate, and a community organizer. She hopes to dedicate her career to the abolition and fundamental restructuring of all systems built on slavery, indigenous dispossession, and economic exploitation.
Mari is a 2026 J.D. Candidate at Georgetown Law, where she is the Joan Claybrook Endowed Opportunity Scholar, RISE Fellow, and the Co-Founder and Co-President of the Abolition Advocacy Project (AAP). In 2024, Mari also co-founded Georgetown Law’s anti-fascist coalition of student organizations formed as a response to the Trump Administration’s attacks on democracy and freedom. Mari serves as Student Attorney in the Georgetown Juvenile Justice Clinic, where she represents children charged with serious felonies and misdemeanors in D.C. Superior Court.
Prior to law school, Mari worked in progressive politics and policy for seven years. She led the political and advocacy campaign that created the community-led police oversight commission in San Diego, worked on a nationwide campaign that successfully increased immigrant voter turnout across six congressional districts, helped elect dozens of progressives to local, state, and federal office, and helped pass legislation to improve workers’ and civil rights. She formerly served as the Interim Executive Director of The Justice Workshop, a San Diego-based non-profit dedicated to criminal, economic, and electoral justice, and was the Vice President of Campaigns and Political Affairs of Evinco Strategies. She earned her bachelor’s degree in political science and public policy from University of California, San Diego.
Mari believes the only way to build a thriving, safe, and just world is to abolish the criminal legal system in its entirety. She hopes that AAP will be of service to this life-long and multi-generational fight for liberation.
.png)
Freedom Gobel
AAP Founder, ALPR Editor-in-Chief & Managing Editor
Freedom Gobel is a 3L at Georgetown Law and Georgetown AAP’s Communications Chair. In addition to the abolition of police and prisons, Freedom is particularly motivated to abolish oppressive capitalistic structures, and seeks to address economic inequality through workers’ rights advocacy, the labor movement, and grassroots organizing. In this space, Freedom has interned for First Shift Justice Project, a D.C.-based organization dedicated to workplace justice for low-income pregnant people and caregivers; she was a Legal & Policy Intern at Legal Action Center, fighting against work reporting requirements as a condition for Medicaid and SNAP benefits, a systemic barrier particularly impacting justice-involved individuals, folks with HIV/AIDS, and folks with substance use disorders; she was a Peggy Browning Fellow at United Food and Commercial Workers International Union; and most recently she served as a Law Clerk for Service Employees International Union, Office of the General Counsel, primarily supporting the organizing and public services legal teams.
She is an incoming Student Attorney for the Georgetown Law Civil Justice Clinic, which represents low-wage workers against exploitative employers in wage theft and benefits denial cases. At Georgetown, Freedom is the President of the Women of Color Collective, the Assistant Music Director for Georgetown LawCappella, and the Senior Symposium Editor for The Georgetown Law Journal, where she recently developed The Journal’s Vol. 114 Symposium: The Labor Movement & Civil Rights in the Modern Era. Freedom holds a B.A. in Legal Studies and Sociology from Northwestern University.