NLG Scholars

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NLG Scholars grew out of the NLG Faculty Network, a forum for law professors to collaborate, communicate, and support our student members. Many of our NLG members–both in law schools and beyond–have established themselves as experts in their fields. Guild members write, present, and speak to media on behalf of themselves and the NLG. With this wealth of expertise and knowledge among NLG members, we wanted to make it easier for our membership and the public to access their work! Please contact our NLG Scholars directly to inquire about setting up an event, getting a quote for a media story, or learning more about their areas of expertise. For more information on NLG scholarship and educational endeavors, or to be added to the NLG Faculty email list or the NLG Scholars list, please email Director of Research and Education Traci Yoder at traci@nlg.org.


Gabriel
 Arkles is an Associate Teaching Professor at Northeastern University School of Law, a Board member of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a volunteer with Black and Pink, and a member of the National Lawyers Guild. His work has focused on issues of race, gender, and disability in the law, particularly issues confronting trans and gender nonconforming prisoners. While in practice at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project from 2004 to 2010, he played a key role in changing New York State policies for LGBT youth in juvenile detention, obtained expungement of a disciplinary conviction for a prisoner who had been disciplined for “sexual contact” after having been raped, and helped many clients get access to basic medical care while incarcerated. He joined the NYU Lawyering Program as an Acting Assistant Professor of Lawyering in 2010, and joined the faculty at Northeastern in 2013. Currently, he teaches in the Legal Skills in Social Context program. His scholarship is available here. Areas of expertise include Legal Research and Writing, Prison Law, Professional Responsibility, Gender and the Law, Disability and the Law. He can be reached at z.arkles@neu.edu.

Michael Avery is Professor Emeritus at Suffolk Law School in Boston. He began practicing law in 1970 and specialized in civil rights, police misconduct, and criminal defense. From 1998 to 2014 he taught at Suffolk Law School, where he was a tenured professor. He is a co-author of We Dissent: Talking Back to the Rehnquist Court (NYU Press, 2009), The Federalist Society: How Conservatives Took the Law Back from Liberals (Vanderbilt, 2013), Police Misconduct: Law and Litigation (West, updated annually since 1978), and the Handbook of Massachusetts Evidence (Wolters Kluwer, updated annually since 1986), and the author of The Glannon Guide to Evidence (Wolters Kluwer, 2d ed. 2018). In addition, he has published several law review articles, op-ed pieces, and short essays. He has a B.A. from Yale College (1966), an LL.B. from Yale Law School (1970), and studied at the University of Moscow as an exchange student in 1968-1969. At age 70, he went back to school and received an M.F.A. from Bennington College in 2017. Prof. Avery was one of the founders and the first president of the National Police Accountability Project (NPAP), a project of the NLG, and currently serves as the president of its Board. From 2003 to 2006 he was the national president of the NLG. Areas of expertise include Constitutional Law, Civil Rights, Police Misconduct, and Evidence. His writing and contact info are available through his website:  www.michaelavery.work.

Brendan Beery is a Professor of Law at Western Michigan University Cooley Law School, where he is a three-time winner of the school’s most prestigious teaching award. He holds a B.A. from Bradley University and a J.D., summa cum laude, from WMU-Cooley, where he graduated first in his class. He teaches constitutional law and has also taught criminal law, criminal procedure, research & writing, advanced writing, interviewing & counseling, and introduction to law. He is a frequent media commentator, having appeared on television, radio, and in other media outlets ranging from Salon.com to The Hill to Law360. His area of expertise is Federal Constitutional Law and he has had scholarly articles about constitutional issue-framing, substantive due process, equal protection, and the First Amendment’s religion clauses accepted for publication in Syracuse Law Review, Albany Law Review, Quinnipiac Law Review, University of Kansas Journal of Law and Public Policy, Drake Law Review, and NLG Review. He has also published (in other areas) in Thomas M. Cooley Law Review and the Michigan Bar Journal. He has authored numerous op-ed pieces in a variety of outlets. Before beginning his teaching career in 2002, he spent several years in private practice after serving as a research attorney for the Michigan Court of Appeals. His passion is advocating for civil rights for all discrete and insular minorities, and in particular the LGBTQ community. His publications can be found here and he can be reached at beeryb@cooley.edu.

Angela A. Bell is a native of New Orleans and 1998 graduate of the Southern University Law Center (SULC) in Baton Rouge, LA. After law school, she spent 10 years working at the First Circuit Court of Appeal where she gained an expertise in appellate law. In 2008, she went to work as a law professor at SULC, where she has taught Legal Writing, Constitutional Law, Professional Responsibility, pre-law, bar review, and Law and Minorities. In addition to her teaching, she is faculty advisor to theSULC Journal of Race, Gender, and Poverty. Prior to entering law school, Bell served as Program Director for the National Council of Negro Women of Greater New Orleans. Professor Bell is a committed public servant who frequently lends her time to causes involving at-risk children, prisoner re-entry, and the plight of the indigent. Professor Bell engages in advocacy work and is a regular speaker in her community as well as for professional organizations. She has participated in local, national, and international media interviews and collaborations to discuss her advocacy work, including La Presse (France),MSNBC, NBC Nightly News, and National Public Radio (All Things Considered). Areas of expertise include restorative, social, and racial justice, criminal justice, and civil rights and human rights issues. She can be reached at abell@sulc.edu.

Josh Blane went to law school to pursue his vision of making the world a safer and more just place by protecting the rights of society’s most vulnerable members: the injured, the civilly wronged and the accused. This vision, coupled with his experience in personal injury, criminal defense and civil rights litigation, make him an ideal advocate to assert the rights of those who often go unheard. Josh’s practice strategy is guided by his belief that obtaining favorable results for his clients is not a game of chance but rather, that each successful outcome is a hard-won victory. Josh is a proud alumnus of the Rutgers Criminal and Youth Justice Clinic where he enjoyed an undefeated record fighting criminal charges while providing pro bono representation to indigent individuals. Adhering to the mantra that there is no adversary “too big” or “too powerful,” Josh also fought on behalf of incarcerated youth in New Jersey for greater educational opportunities and increased family visitation. Josh has been recognized as an excellent legal writer, having served as an editor for the Rutgers Law Record and having had his own scholarly work, Drowning in Data: How the Federal Rules Are Staying Afloat in a Flood of Information, published in the Journal’s 2017-18 edition. Josh has also contributed legal analysis to news publications such as the New York Amsterdam News and is a member of the National Lawyers Guild, New York State Trial Lawyers Association and the LGBT Bar Association of New York. By zealously defending the rights of the accused and jealously guarding the rights of the civilly wronged, Josh continues to advance his vision of protecting public safety and pursuing justice with every case he handles. Areas of specialization include personal injury, civil rights and criminal defense. Josh can be reached at jb@joshblane.com.

Zsea Bowmani teaches environmental law at Santa Clara University and co-leads the Law & Advocacy Project of the university’s Environmental Justice & the Common Good Initiative. Zsea founded and currently coordinates the EJ Committee of the NLG Bay Area Chapter to provide legal support to the local environmental justice movement. As a scholar-activist, Zsea’s work investigates the intersections of the environment, race, gender and sexual orientation, reproductive justice, human rights, and the law. He is particularly interested in the parallels between the treatment of Black, Indigenous, disabled, queer, feminized, and other marginalized bodies with the human treatment of the nonhuman world. He explores this in his forthcoming piece in the Tulane Journal of Law and Sexuality. Zsea’s scholarship has also been published in the Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law, Seattle Journal for Social Justice, Tulane University School of Law Public Law & Legal Theory Research Paper Series, and the University of Toledo College of Law Legal Studies Research Paper Series. Prior to his role at SCU, Zsea was an attorney with the ACLU and a Policy Fellow at the National LGBTQ Task Force. In these roles, Zsea worked on legal cases as well as state and federal policies to challenge the criminalization of marginalized communities, to protect LGBTQ people from discrimination, and to expand access to health care. Among his accomplishments, Zsea helped draft joint amicus briefs for US Supreme Court cases denying coverage for birth control in employer-sponsored health plans (Zubik) and state restrictions on abortion healthcare (Woman’s Health), and also created a first-of-its-kind toolkit for reproductive justice and LGBTQ advocates. Zsea received his BA in History from Stanford University and his JD from Santa Clara Law with certificates in Public International Law with honors and Public Interest and Social Justice Law. His publications can be found at Academia.edu and the Social Science Research Network (SSRN). Areas of expertise include environmental justice, reproductive justice, trans and LGBTQ rights, civil rights, and international human rights. Zsea can be reached at zsea@nlgsf.org.

Mark S. Brodin is Professor of Law, Lee Distinguished Scholar, and former Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at Boston College Law School.  An honors graduate of Columbia College and Columbia Law School (where he served on the Law Review), Brodin clerked for United States District Judge Joseph L. Tauro from 1972 to 1974.  He was Senior Staff Counsel with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law of the Boston Bar Association from 1974 to 1980, representing plaintiffs in civil rights actions in the employment, housing, First Amendment, and police misconduct areas. He is the author of numerous law review articles, and co-author of Civil Procedure: Doctrine, Practice, and Context (with Steve Subrin, Martha Minow, Thom Main, & Alexandra Lahav), Criminal Procedure: The Constitution and the Police (with Robert M. Bloom), and the Handbook of Massachusetts Evidence (with Paul J. Liacos & Michael Avery). William P. Homans: A Life in Court is a biography of the iconic criminal defense and civil liberties lawyer. Professor Brodin is Editorial Consultant to Weinstein’s Federal Evidence (six-volume treatise). He served for brief periods as an appellate attorney with the Massachusetts Defenders Committee (now the Committee for Public Counsel) and as a special assistant district attorney in Norfolk County. Areas of expertise include employment discrimination, constitutional criminal procedure, civil procedure, evidence, and litigation. He can be reached mark.brodin@bc.edu.

Bryan K. Bullock owns a full service law firm that has been providing quality representation for 15 years. From 2005-2011, Bullock served as habeas counsel for men being detained in Guantanamo Bay. As a result, he won the Frederick Douglas Human Rights Award from the Southern Center for Human Rights. He is also the winner of the Joseph A. Pitts Award from the Gary branch of the NAACP, the Distinguished Service Award from Gary Neighborhood Services, and the Alumni Service Award from Valparaiso University School of Law for his creation and funding of the BLSA Alumni Scholarship Fund. Bullock represented the Calumet Project, a social justice community organization, in litigation against BP Amoco. He served as the Chairman of the Policy Subcommittee for the 2030 Plan with the Northern Indiana Regional Planning Committee and was invited by the Federal Highway Administration to participate in its Transportation Excellence Committee for transportation justice advocacy. Bullock participated in the Indiana Moral Mondays community action in Indianapolis and spoke on the issue of environmental justice. Bullock is an adjunct professor at Indiana University Northwest where he teaches a course in Race and the Law in the Minority Studies Department. He has served on the boards of the Gary Neighborhood Services, the Humane Society of NWI and the Calumet Project. He was a founding member of the Environmental Justice Partnership. He currently serves as the President of the Indiana NLG Chapter and is member of the National Coalition of Black Lawyers. Bullock is a freelance writer whose work has appeared on websites such as Truthout, the Jurist, and BlackAgendaReport.  His areas of expertise include environmental racism, police misconduct, employment discrimination and anti-imperialism. He can be reached at attybullock@yahoo.com.

Daniel J. Canon is a civil rights lawyer, educator, writer, speaker, consultant, and activist based in the Midwest. He is Director of Externships and Professor of Law at the Louis D. Brandeis School of Law, where he teaches courses on civil rights and civil procedure. His research is focused primarily on lawyer mental health, the intersection of the labor movement and the criminal legal system, and the role of lawyers in creating social change. Dan practices law with Saeed & Little, LLP, and has consistently been voted one of the region’s top lawyers in the area of individual/constitutional rights for over a decade. He has argued numerous times before various state and federal appellate courts, and is best known as lead counsel for the Kentucky plaintiffs in the landmark Supreme Court case of Obergefell v. Hodges, which brought marriage equality to all fifty states. He was also plaintiffs’ counsel in Miller v. Davis, the highly publicized case in which couples were refused marriage licenses in Rowan County, Kentucky, and counsel for protesters in Nwanguma v. Trump. He has represented plaintiffs in numerous other high-profile cases involving the rights of incarcerated people, wrongful convictions, and police brutality. His writing has been featured in numerous publications, including The Washington Post, The National Law Journal, Above the Law, Salon, and Slate. He is a regular columnist for Louisville’s LEO Weekly, and has been quoted and profiled extensively by National Public Radio, Time, The Wall Street Journal, Nightline, The New York Times, and many other national and international news sources. His bestselling book entitled PLEADING OUT: How Plea Bargaining Creates a Permanent Criminal Class, is now available. Areas of expertise include Civil & constitutional rights, Employment, and Appeals. Dan can be reached at dan@dancanonlaw.com.

Alan W. Clarke is a Professor of Integrated Studies at Utah Valley University. He holds a Ph.D. from Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, an LL.M. from Queen’s University and a J.D. from William and Mary. In 2014/15, he was a fellow of the Nathanson Centre for Transnational Human Rights, Crime and Security. Before UVU he taught at Ferris State University, University of Wisconsin, Parkside, and was a visiting scholar at Michigan Technological University. His trial practice includes death penalty defense, death row post-conviction process, minority voting rights, organization of the first successful fishermen’s union south of the Mason-Dixon, representation of dissidents in the longest take-over in the history of Indian Country, civil rights and poverty law.  Publications include, The Bitter Fruit of American Justice, International and Domestic Resistance to the Death Penalty (co-authored with Laurelyn Whitt) (Northeastern University Press, 2007) and Rendition to Torture (Rutgers University Press, 2012). He is currently working on a book on the genocide of indigenous peoples of North America and is the author of 40 articles in law reviews in the US and Canada and in Criminology, Sociology and Education journals. Areas of expertise include capital punishment, torture, genocide, international human rights law and international criminal law. He can be reached at alanwclarke11@gmail.com.

Elena L. Cohen is an attorney, doctoral candidate, and activist. She received her J.D. from Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, and is currently a PhD student in the Political Science department at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and an adjunct associate professor teaching Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and Gender and the Law classes in the City University of New York system.. Ms. Cohen served as the President of the New York City Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild for two terms, and is currently serving as co-chair of the NYC Chapter’s Mass Defense Committee. Her legal practice includes criminal defense (primarily of those arrested for protest-related activities), creating and settling estates for people who die as a result of police or correctional officer misconduct, and judgment execution. She has published articles such as “Divided in Theory, United in Practice : the American Perspective on the Interface between Politics and the Courts”, “Reflections on Legal Support and Occupy Wall Street”, and a chapter in Biopolitics and Utopia: An Interdisciplinary Reader (2015). Ms. Cohen’s areas of expertise include sexuality, non-human animals, and comparative constitutional law. She can be reached at ElenaCohenESQ@gmail.com.

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Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and former NLG president. She lectures globally on international human rights and U.S. foreign policy and is the author of numerous books and articles available on her website. She is on the editorial board of the NLG Review and her frequent columns are posted on sites such as Huffington Post, Truthout, Truthdig, Jurist, Alternet, Consortium News and ZNet. She has been a criminal defense attorney, and was staff counsel to the California Agricultural Labor Relations Board. Professor Cohn is the U.S. representative to the Association of American Jurists, and deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL). She sits on the board of the Vietnam Agent Orange Relief and Responsibility Campaign, and the national advisory board of Veterans for Peace. She has testified about government torture policy, the illegality of the wars, the duty to obey lawful orders, and the duty to disobey unlawful orders. Professor Cohn has received many awards for her work in legal education and human rights. A graduate of Stanford University and Santa Clara Law School, she debated the legality of the war in Afghanistan at the Oxford Union in 2010. Areas of expertise include human rights, US foreign policy, civil rights and civil liberties, criminal justice, and cameras in the courtroom. She can be reached at marjorielegal@gmail.com.

Charles R. DiSalvo is the Woodrow A. Potesta Professor of Law at West Virginia University where he teaches one of the few law school courses in the United States on civil disobedience.  He has represented civil disobedients in state and federal trial and appellate courts, written widely on the subject of civil disobedience and the law, and lectured on the subject in the United States, Australia, and India. He is the author of M.K. Gandhi, Attorney at Law: The Man Before the Mahatma, published first in India by Random House and then in the rest of the world by the University of California (Berkeley).  Professor DiSalvo was educated at St. John Fisher College (B.A., history, summa cum laude), Claremont Graduate School (M.A., East Asian studies), and the University of Southern California (J.D), where he was a member of the Southern California Law Review. Upon his graduation from law school, he was awarded a Reginald Heber Smith Community Lawyer Fellowship to practice poverty law for the Appalachian Research and Defense Fund of Kentucky. Before accepting a position at West Virginia University, he served as a Bigelow Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School.  In addition to his course on civil disobedience, he teaches courses on civil procedure and trial advocacy.   He is the co-founder of the West Virginia Fund for Law in the Public Interest.  He has won college, university, state, and national awards for excellence in teaching. He can be reached at cdisalvo@wvu.edu.

Anthony Dixon is the National Employment Manager for When People Work, the CEO/Founder of Transformation Group Enterprises, the developer of the Breaking Free from Criminal Thinking program and the Life Areas substance abuse curriculum, a certified journeyperson with over 20 years of experience as an expert in preparing individuals for parole and community transition, a holder of a Bachelor of Science degree in Organizational Management, and an NLG member. As a social justice activist and public speaker, he is proficient in legislative writing, advocating the insider stakeholder’s position, and is one of the principal framers of the comprehensive New York state Truth in Parole (T.I.P.) Bill. He has received commendations for developing two anti-drug and anti-violent books, which are geared towards crime prevention and intervention. He has written articles on solitary confinement, the death penalty, the win-win of college in prisons, the misuse of labels of people with felonies, the profile of those who return and those who do not, myth busters concerning people with a criminal past, and the mythicization of the reentry theme. The Breaking Free from Criminal Thinking Program that he developed has had a zero recidivism rate since its inception in 2010. In 2015, the RISE Award was conferred on Anthony for extraordinary striving among marginalized groups. At his current job, Anthony matches felony friendly national employers with people with a criminal record. He can be reached at anthonyup77@gmail.com or transformations7777@gmail.com.

Doug Ecks, Esq. graduated magna cum laude from U.C. Hastings, and has been practicing law since 2011.  He has been an active member of NLG Los Angeles since 2018 and given “know your rights” training to protesters and acted as a legal observer.  He has done numerous writs of mandamus in support of document requests under the California Public Records Act, especially as in regards to election integrity and transparency in Los Angeles.  He also practices criminal defense in felony and misdemeanor cases, including pro bono cases for Homeless clients on behalf of NLG outreach programs. He has written articles on election integrity and politics, including an interview with Jonathan Simon, author of Code Red who has analyzed the ongoing Red Shift in elections since 2004. Doug can be reached at theecksfactordefense@gmail.com.

jerry-friedmanJerold D. Friedman is a social justice attorney who practices federal law in Houston. He is an international speaker and author on legal, scientific, and political aspects of vegan and nonhuman animal advocacy. He is a member of the board of Proactivist Charitable Project, a Texas nonprofit organization dedicated to help fund social justice litigation, and he is a former board member of In Defense of Animals, National Lawyers Guild Los Angeles, and Cannon River STEM School, among others. He co-authored an article on the ethics of mixing human and nonhuman genes in American Journal of Bioethics (2003) and authored three articles related to activism in Cultural Encyclopedia of Vegetarianism (2010), and authored a chapter on a lawsuit to save kangaroos in Critical Media and Animal Studies (2015). Areas of expertise include all topics related to veganism and/or animal rights, including arguments for animal personhood. He can be reached at jerry@activistlaw.com orhttp://lawofficejdf.wordpress.com.

pooja-gehiPooja Gehi served as the Executive Director of the National Lawyers Guild from 2015-2020. She graduated from American University’s Washington College (WCL) of Law in 2004 with a JD/MA in international affairs. At WCL she was the board chair of her NLG Law School Chapter. For the past eight years, Pooja has worked as a staff attorney and then the Director of Immigrant Justice at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP) where she provided direct legal services for hundreds of low-income transgender and gender nonconforming clients in administrative hearings, immigration proceedings, civil litigation, and prisoners’ rights cases. Throughout this experience, she collaborated closely with LGBT organizations to build an analysis of gender justice among poverty and queer advocates across the nation. Pooja recently settled a lawsuit securing access to transition related healthcare for New York State Medicaid recipients. Pooja’s most recent publication is “Connecting State Violence and Anti-Violence: An Examination of the Impact of VAWA and Hate Crimes Legislation on Asian American Communities.” Areas of expertise include immigration, gender, sexuality and the law, civil procedure, and police misconduct. She can be reached at poojagehi2010@gmail.com.

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David Gespass is a lawyer in Birmingham, Alabama. He has been a member of the NLG Review editorial board since 2000, serving as editor-in-chief from 2004-2009. He has taught courses in poverty law at the University of Alabama law school and human rights through the University of Alabama at Birmingham Anthropology Department. He has been the primary author of two NLG amicus briefs before the Supreme Court: Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 and Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder. Both focused on U.S. obligations under human rights conventions. David has been on the organizing committees for several Southern Human Rights Organizers Conferences and hosted the Birmingham conference in 2010. He was inducted into the King Chapel Collegium of Scholars at Morehouse College in 2004 and received an award for Community Service from the Birmingham Emancipation Society and a Golden Jurist award from the Birmingham Branch of the NAACP for his commitment to civil rights. Most recently, he delivered the Birmingham Public Library’s 13th Annual MLK Memorial Lecture. He has participated in, or observed, elections in Bosnia, Croatia, Armenia and Venezuela and has spoken on international election standards. His current practice focuses on police misconduct and civil rights (he was voted one of Birmingham’s top civil rights attorneys in 2015) and, because of his advanced age and contrary to all reasonable expectations, probate and estate work. Areas of expertise and practice include police misconduct and civil rights, Social Security disability, personal injury, GI and Veterans’ rights, and criminal defense. Many of his articles can be found on the firm web site, gespassandjohnson.com. David can be reached at pass.gandjlaw@gmail.com.

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Lee D. Goldstein is a progressive activist, teacher, scholar and lawyer. He has been the Reginald Heber Smith Fellow at the Northwestern Legal Assistance Clinic, Director of the Legal Studies Program at the Goddard-Cambridge Graduate School, and staff attorney at Project Place Legal Service in Boston. From 1975, he has practiced law as part of the community law office of Goldstein and Feuer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, representing tenants, workers, community and political groups. His legal work has focused on privacy and discrimination claims on behalf of workers, as well as supporting persons engaged in mass demonstrations, civil resistance, and evictions blockings. After teaching legal theory at U. Mass- Amherst, Jurisprudence at Northeastern Law School, and completing a LLM at Harvard, he was Supervising Attorney and Clinical Instructor at the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau until 2019. He has also been a teaching member of Harvard Law School’s Trial Advocacy Workshop and assisted Legal Aid Bureau students in the formation of a Wage and Hour Practice Group. As part of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau’s Foreclosure Task Force, he advised cities and towns about taking “underwater” mortgages by utilizing their eminent domain power. He is currently a Supervising Attorney for the Coronavirus Eviction Legal Help Project (CELHP). His publications include the book Communes, Law and Common Sense and “High Theory and Low Practice: A Dream and Five Theses On Being a Left Lawyer And Legal Worker.” Areas of expertise include law and social change, trial practice, clinical practice and legal education, and poverty law (landlord/tenant, family law, unemployment, foreclosure defense, wage and hour). He can be reached at lee.goldsteinandfeuer@gmail.com.

Peter Goselin is a labor and employment lawyer based in Hartford, Connecticut. Over more than 23 years, Peter has represented individual employees and labor unions in legal claims against employers. Peter has taught classes on the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) at the University of Connecticut School of Law and a major part of his practice is wage and hour claims, including claims of wage theft (overtime, minimum wage, misclassification and non- payment of wages) brought against employers on behalf of immigrant workers. He has spoken extensively on the rights of immigrants in the workplace. Peter can be reached at pdgoselin@gmail.com.

J. Remy Green is a guest lecturer and adjunct professor with NYU and CUNY, where they teach courses that cover law and technology issues, as well as civil and constitutional rights. Mx. Green is also a published author, with full-length articles appearing in the North Carolina Journal of Law and Technology, Syracuse Law Review,and the Rutgers Law Record, in addition to a wide variety of essays in various fora. 

Their current work can be found on Medium (https://medium.com/@j.remy.green) and SSRN (https://ssrn.com/author=2975871).  Mx. Green can be reached at j.remy.green@gmail.com.

Paul Harris graduated from Berkeley Law School and clerked for a federal judge. He co-founded the San Francisco Community Law Collective, a multi-racial law office with a policy of equal salaries and decision-making among lawyers and secretaries. The Collective won community service awards from the SF Board of Supervisors and Centro Legal. Paul was listed in three editions of Best Lawyers in America.  He is a former National President of the National Lawyers Guild and author of the critically acclaimed Black Rage Confronts the Law. Areas of expertise include criminal law; Indian Civil Rights act. He can be reached at www.guerrillalaw.com.

Kris Hermes is a longtime social justice activist. Organizing with ACT UP Philadelphia in the late 1990s spurred his interest in legal support work and led to his years-long involvement with the R2K Legal collective. Since 2000, Hermes has been an active, award-winning legal worker-member of the NLG and has been a part of numerous law collectives and legal support efforts. In 2006, he co-founded the Grand Jury Resistance Project with fellow NLG members and others. In 2014, Hermes served on the Guild’s Executive Council as the Legal Worker Vice President and, in 2015, held an interim staff position in the National Office as Mass Defense Coordinator. In 2015, Hermes authored Crashing the Party: Legacies and Lessons from the RNC 2000 (PM Press), which examined how Philadelphia helped develop and usher in today’s model of policing political protest. His book explains how activists and legal workers used a collective, defendant-led strategy to push back against the legal system and win. Hermes has a special interest in exploiting vulnerabilities in the legal system in order to win cases and advance political movements. To achieve this, Hermes uses the media to demystify the legal system, help activists shape the narrative in criminal and civil cases, and amplify political theater in the courtroom. In both a professional and volunteer capacity, Hermes has issued hundreds of press releases, organized press conferences, and pitched countless stories to news reporters and editors. Hermes also has an extensive bibliography of articles, commentaries and blogs on policing political protest and the resistance it incites. Areas of expertise include contemporary history and tactics of policing protest, especially surveillance and infiltration of political groups; National Special Security Events; collective action taken by arrestees and defendants such as Jail Solidarity and Court Solidarity; and Grand juries and grand jury resistance. Kris can be contacted at krishermes@earthlink.net.

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César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández is a visiting professor at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law and publisher of crImmigration.com. César is a graduate of Brown University and Boston College Law School. He is Of Counsel to García & García Attorneys at Law, P.L.L.C. César’s academic interests center on crimmigration law, and he has published articles about the right to counsel for immigrants in the criminal justice system, immigration imprisonment, and race-based immigration policing. His book, titled Crimmigration Law, was published by the American Bar Association in 2015. In addition to teaching a crimmigration seminar, he teaches Immigration Law, Criminal Procedure, and Torts. César makes frequent public appearances discussing crimmigration law. He regularly speaks to groups of lawyers and has presented his academic research at conferences held at Yale, Howard, Brigham Young University, St. John’s, and many other law schools. He has also been quoted in the Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio, International Business Times, San Antonio Express-News, U.S. Law Week, and The Nation. In 2014, he received the Derrick A. Bell, Jr. Award from the Association of American Law Schools Section on Minority Groups. His area of expertise is crimmigration law. He can be reached at ccgarciahernandez@gmail.com.

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Jill M. Humphries is a multi-disciplinary Solutions Based Consultant with 25-years extensive experience designing and implementing solutions that resolve operational inefficiencies in public, private and nonprofit institutions. As an analyst & scholar activist, Dr. Humphries has consulted on legal, public administration, public health, and environmental initiatives in the United States, Zimbabwe and the Caribbean.  Her body of work blends formal academic experience, expertise in community engagement, and a social justice focus to advancing the human rights of Black and marginalized people globally. She has taught at The Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University and currently is a distance learning instructor with the Africana Studies program at the University of Toledo. She is Associate Editor for Ìrìnkèrindò: Journal of African Migration. Dr. Humphries was a recipient of the 2018-2019 Ambassador’s Distinguished Scholars Program for Ethiopia, sponsored by the United States Embassy in Ethiopia, the Institute for International Education (IIE), and Bahir Dar University. She is a national legal observer trainer who assists the legal and activist community with building legal support systems including lawyer representation, legal observation, jail support, and civil/human rights work. She developed a legal observer curriculum that improves the cultural competency and implicit bias awareness of Legal Observers in interactions with demonstrators, Black communities and law enforcement. Dr. Humphries was recognized by the National Lawyers Guild in 2015 as Legal Worker of the Year for her outstanding legal observer work in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. As the lead researcher, she co-authored the NLG Mass Defense Committee Leadership Capacity Building Report. The first empirical study to assess local chapter mass defense systems since its’ founding 78-years ago. Dr. Humphries earned her PhD in Public Administration from the University of Southern California. She holds a B.A. in Anthropology, a Masters Degree in Public Health from the University California, Los Angeles, and completed post-graduate gender studies at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. Areas of expertise include Black Diaspora organizing, learning management and instructional design, comparative racial, gender, sexuality & queer formations, Africana descendant people’s relationship to nature, and designing community legal infrastructure. Her NLG publications include “Legal Observing in Baltimore: A Report,” “Black Lives Matter Clarion Call for Black-Led Legal Support,” and “Legal Observing From The Front Lines – STL, MO.” To learn more about her scholarship select the following links: Academia.edu & YouTubeChannel. You can reach Dr. Humphries at jhumphries2012@gmail.com.

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Caitlin Kelly Henry is an attorney and legal consultant working to alter conditions in jails and prisons through litigation, education, advocacy and organizing. Kelly Henry has worked with the Center for Constitutional Rights, Brennan Center for Justice, California Appellate Project, California Prison Focus, Prison Hunger Strike Solidarity Coalition,Asian Law Caucus National Security and Civil Rights Program, and Swords to Plowshares. She is Adjunct Faculty at UC California Hastings College of the Law, Sonoma State University, and the California Institute of Integral Studies, teaching courses such as Community Law, Criminal Justice and Public Policy, Rights of the Accused, Punishment and Corrections, Activist Legal Skills, and Campaigning for Social Justice. She makes presentations based on skills learned in her Public Records Act and Freedom of Information/Privacy Act (FOIA) work. She is an active NLG member, co-founder of the Bay Area NLG Chapter’s Police and Prisons Committee, and leads the Support From Outside training series that aims to assist people in developing skills to support incarcerated people. She is co-founder of the Prisoner Advocacy Network, a group that trains and pairs people to provide legal advocacy to activists in solitary confinement. Kelly Henry serves on the Legal Advisory Team for TGIJP (Transgender Gender Variant & Intersex Justice Project). Kelly Henry’s legal practice includes state and federal civil and criminal matters. She is experienced in writs, including state habeas writs and writs of mandamus. She is versed in petitions for re-sentencing and petitions for early termination of supervised release (probation/parole). Areas of expertise include prisoners’ rights, post-conviction remedies, re-sentencing, FOIA, and business entity formation. She can be reached at ckh@caitlinkellyhenry.com.

Andy Izenson is an Associate Attorney and mediator with Diana Adams Law & Mediation, PLLC, and is a trained mediator, collaborative counsel, and passionate advocate for queer and nontraditional families and for trans and gender non-conforming youth and adults. Longstanding affiliations with the National LGBT Bar Association, and with the NLG as a member of the NYC Chapter Executive Committee and a legal observer, frame Andy’s commitment to support for queer community and families as well as to a radical, anti-assimilationist politic. Andy studied sociolinguistics at Skidmore College, publishing a thesis on nonbinary gender and paralinguistic communication in the International Journal of Arts and Sciences, and then attended New York Law School as a member of the Justice Action Center and a Trustee Scholar. Andy’s writing has appeared on the Family Matters Blog, theYes Means Yes Blog, 24Magazine, and The Advocate. Andy currently educates at organizations, schools, and conferences all over the country, including the LGBT Bar Association Conference, Creating Change, Woodhull Sexual Freedom Summit, Columbia University, New York University, Harvard University, Rutgers University, Skidmore College, Cooper Union, Family and Divorce Mediation Council, and various community organizations. Andy is available for workshops on gender and trans competence for organizations and practitioners, sexuality, consent and communication, alternative justice systems/transformative justice and community accountability, legal support for protests and direct actions, and radical topics in family law including polyamory and the law, the future of family law, and anti-assimilationist queer family law policy and practice. Andy can be reached at andy@dianaadamslaw.net.

Jack Jackson‘s teaching and research is at the intersection of political theory and U.S. constitutional law. Professor Jackson received his J.D. from the Cornell Law School, where he was senior note editor for the Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy, earned a Public Law Certificate, and was elected to the Order of the Coif. He earned a Ph.D. in political science at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was recipient of the Mark Rozance Memorial Award for best dissertation in the field of political theory.In 2016 he held the Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in Constitutional and Political Theory at McGill University. He has been a Visiting Scholar at Emory Law School’s Vulnerability and Human Condition Initiative, a Fellow at UC Berkeley’s Townsend Center for the Humanities, and an Ella Baker Fellow at the Center for Constitutional Rights. For over 15 years he has served on the Board of Directors of the Homeless Action Center, a non-profit law firm in Berkeley, California. Professor Jackson’s scholarship focuses on political theory and law with a special emphasis on political theories of freedom, public law, feminist and queer theory, constitutionalism and democracy, and political theories of time. He has published two books:Law Without Future: Anti-Constitutional Politics and the American Right
(University of Pennsylvania Press)
and Feminist and Queer Legal Theory: Intimate Encounters, Uncomfortable Conversations
(Routledge). He can be reached at jacksoje@whitman.edu.

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Gautam Jagannath is a leading innovator and founding director of Social Justice Collaborative in Oakland, CA.  Gautam’s skills as a trial lawyer and appellate advocate support SJC’s main services. Gautam has always been passionate about defense law. He attended Northeastern University School of Law, the nation’s leading public interest law school, with the goal of becoming a public defender. However, after noticing the impact of criminal law on low-income immigrants, Gautam was drawn to the intersection between criminal and immigration law. Struck by the lack of access to counsel for immigrants, he believed that forming SJC was a natural next step toward alleviating the lack of legal services for low-income noncitizen. As SJC is working toward becoming the immigration public defender, Gautam strives to increase representation for both detained and non-detained individuals. Gautam teaches administrative law and sits on the Board of Directors for the Bay Area Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild and the South Asian Bar Association. He is an active part of various progressive legal movements. Gautam speaks Spanish and Tamil. He is a member of the California bar and the Northern District of California. Areas of expertise include immigration and crimmigration law. He can be reached at gautam@socialjusticecollaborative.org or 510.992.3964.

Michael T. Kirkpatrick is an attorney at Public Citizen Litigation Group (PCLG) in Washington, DC, where he litigates public interest cases at all levels of the federal and state judiciaries, including the U.S. Supreme Court. His practice areas include constitutional law, civil rights, class actions, administrative law, and open government. Mr. Kirkpatrick joined PCLG in 2004. From 2014-2016, he was a full-time visiting professor at Georgetown Law School and director of the Civil Rights Clinic. He returned to PCLG in August 2016. Before joining PCLG, Mr. Kirkpatrick was a senior trial attorney with the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice (1995-2004), where he litigated employment discrimination cases and defended the constitutionality of federal affirmative action programs. Earlier in his career (1991-1995), he was a staff attorney with the Farm Worker Division of Texas Rural Legal Aid, where he litigated employment and civil rights cases on behalf of migrant, transnational, and contingent workers, negotiated labor agreements for striking workers, and counseled farm worker unions and community organizations. Since 2007, Mr. Kirkpatrick has served as an adjunct professor at Georgetown Law School, teaching a course each Fall on ethics in public interest practice. Mr. Kirkpatrick has received the Public Justice Trial Lawyer of the Year Award, the Peter M. Cicchino Award for Outstanding Advocacy in the Public Interest, and the AUWCL Dean’s Award for Professional Responsibility. He is a seven-time recipient of the Department of Justice Special Achievement Award. He has been a Wasserstein Public Interest Fellow at Harvard Law School, the Law and Policy Mentor for the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, and a Government Fellow for the ABA’s Section of Labor and Employment Law. Mr. Kirkpatrick is a frequent speaker on civil rights, legal ethics, and public interest lawyering. He can be reached at mkirkpatrick@citizen.org.

Nancy K. D. Lemon has been a leading authority on domestic violence law for over three decades. A practicing attorney, she has also provided expert testimony in many types of cases. She has worked to craft many pieces of California legislation affecting survivors of domestic violence and their children. Since 1988, Professor Lemon has taught Domestic Violence Law and the Domestic Violence Practicum at UC Berkeley’s School of Law. She authored the first textbook on Domestic Violence Law in 1996, now in its 5th edition. In 2012, she co-founded the Family Violence Appellate Project, where she is the Legal Director. She can be reached at nlemon@berkeley.edu.

Justin R. La Mort manages Brooklyn Law School’s Housing Rights Clinic and is a Supervising Attorney at Mobilization for Justice. Before joining MFJ, Mr. La Mort was a Supervising Attorney at CAMBA Legal Services where he represented hundreds of tenants in Brooklyn. His legal writings have been published in the Missouri Law Review,NYU Review of Law & Social ChangeJournal of Affordable Housing & Community Development LawJournal of Regulatory ComplianceInterdisciplinary Journal of Human Rights Law, and the online Harvard Law & Policy Review. His areas of expertise include housing justice and landlord-tenant law. He can be reached at jlamort@mfjlegal.org.

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James Marc Leas is a patent attorney and a past co-chair of the NLG Palestine Subcommittee. He drafted submissions to the ICC prosecutor on behalf of the Palestine Subcommittee that showed that neither the facts nor the law fit Israel’s claim that it acts in “self-defense” against rockets. He collected evidence in Gaza immediately after Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012 as part of a 20-member delegation from the US and Europe and authored or co-authored articles describing findings, including “Why the Self-Defense Doctrine Doesn’t Legitimize Israel’s Assault on Gaza.” He participated in the 2009 NLG delegation to Gaza immediately after Operation Cast Lead and contributed to its report, “Onslaught: Israel’s Attack on Gaza and the Rule of Law.” Over 20 of his articles on Israeli attacks on Palestine have been published on Truthout, Counterpunch, Mondoweiss, Opednews, and the Huffington Post. He has been an active member of the campaign to end Israel’s wars and occupations since 1982. Before becoming an attorney, James was an engineer at IBM, and he holds over 40 patents for his inventions. While an IBM employee he led a vigorous campaign to end IBM sales to South Africa. He also served as a staff physicist for the Union of Concerned Scientists in its Washington, DC office for a year in the aftermath of the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant. He is a graduate of MIT and completed all but the dissertation toward a PhD in physics from the University of Massachusetts. He is a member of the Vermont Bar Association, the American Bar Association, the American Intellectual Property Law Association, and NLG. He can be reached at jimmy@vermontpatentlawyer.com.

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Harold McDougall of Howard University School of Law is a graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School. He has a background in civil rights and community organizing, and served asWashington Bureau Chief for the NAACP in the late 1990s. Professor McDougall specializes in civic culture and civic infrastructure, focusing particularly on how these support sustainable social and economic development and human rights. Prof. McDougall has written numerous articles andHuffington Post blogs, as well as two books pursuing these themes—Black Baltimore: A New Theory of Community and African American Civil Rights in the Age of Obama: A History and Handbook. His most recent articles are “The Challenges of Legal Education in the Neoliberal University,” (NLG Review, 2015) andThe Rebellious Law Professor: Combining Cause and Reflective Lawyering,” (J. Legal Education, 2015). The Rebellious Law Professor was recently featured in Scholastica’s spotlight blog. Areas of expertise include civil rights, sustainable development, human rights, land use and development, community development, and gentrification. He can be reached athmcdougall@law.howard.edu.

Chris Morten is a lawyer who currently teaches at New York University School of Law, as the Deputy Director of NYU’s Technology Law and Policy Clinic.  He is also a Fellow at NYU’s Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy, Yale’s Information Society Project, and Yale’s Global Health Justice Partnership.  Chris’s clinical work, research, and writing focus on access to knowledge.  He has some experience filing and litigating Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. His areas of expertise include freedom of information (public records), intellectual property, and trade secrecy and his publications can be found at chrismorten.com. He can be reached at cjm531@nyu.edu.

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William Most is the lead attorney at the New Orleans-based Law Office of William Most. His expertise is primarily in the areas of civil rights and environmental litigation. For example, he represents the estate of Glenn Ford, a Louisiana man seeking compensation for the twenty-nine years he spent on death row due to a wrongful conviction. William recently succeeded in stopping a California fracking company from dumping wastewater into unlined pits in the ground, where it risked contaminating drinking water. He has represented a diverse group of inmates, non-profits, protesters, landowners, Native American tribes, and farmers. A marine-biologist-turned-lawyer, William received his JD from the Berkeley School of Law and his AB from Harvard University. He can be reached at williammost@gmail.com or (504) 509-5023.

 

Richard Renner is a Partner in the Washington, DC, employment law firm of Kalijarvi, Chuzi, Newman & Fitch. He first joined NLG as a law student at NYU in 1978 and he participated in the Unemployment Action Center. He is a member of the NLG’s Labor and Employment Committee (L&EC), and has participated in NLG delegations to Cuba and Chiapas, Mexico. While Richard handles a variety of labor and employment matters for employees in the federal and private sectors, he is particularly known for his advocacy on behalf of whistleblowers. He has written amicus briefs on the rights of corporate fraud whistleblowers under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) and the False Claims Act (FCA). He co-wrote amicus briefs in Lawson v. FMR LLC, 571 U.S. 429 (2014) (SOX protects the employees of the contractors of public companies). He was the lead author of a successful MWELA amicus brief in Foster v. Univ. of Md.-Eastern Shore, 787 F.3d 243 (4th Cir 2015) (traditional methods of proving unlawful retaliation apply to meet the “but for” causation standard). In 2020, Washingtonian Magazine names Richard one of the best whistleblower attorneys in Washington, DC. Richard founded Tate & Renner in Dover, Ohio where he represented environmental whistleblowers, victims of wage theft, consumers and immigrants. He served as Co-Chair of NELA’s Whistleblower Committee, and twice won election to NELA’s Executive Board. He moved to Washington, DC, in 2008 to serve as Legal Director of the National Whistleblowers Center (NWC). NWC fired him and all of his co-workers in 2012 after they announced their plan to form a staff union. Richard has a math degree from MIT and a JD from NYU. He can be reached at rrenner@kcnlaw.com.

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Carrie Rosenbaum is a scholar, immigration law professor, and immigration attorney living, writing, and representing noncitizens in the San Francisco Bay Area.

She has published and presented extensively on immigration law, criminal-immigration law, marijuana law and noncitizens. Carrie can be reach at crosenbaumimmigrationlaw@gmail.com.

 

Kathryn Sabbeth is an associate professor of law at the University of North Carolina. Her teaching and scholarship focus on the role of lawyers in society and poor people’s experiences with the law. Her core research interest is the potential for law to promote equality and the limits of that potential. Recent publications include Simplicity as Justice, (Under)Enforcement of Poor Tenants’ Rights, and Housing Defense as the New Gideon. At UNC, she has taught the Civil Legal Assistance Clinic, Civil Lawyering Process, Employment Discrimination, and Legal Ethics and Social Justice. In the Civil Clinic, she and her students represent tenants, workers, and others fighting for racial, economic, and gender justice. Before moving to UNC, Professor Sabbeth taught at Georgetown University Law Center, where she served as a teaching fellow in the Institute for Public Representation, and clerked for the Honorable James C. Francis IV in the Southern District of New York and the Honorable Warren J. Ferguson of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. She received her J.D. from New York University School of Law, where she was an Arthur Garfield Hays Civil Liberties Fellow, an editor for the Review of Law and Social Change, and the recipient of the Christian Jarecki (‘98) Memorial Prize for outstanding work in NYU’s clinical program. During law school, she worked at organizations including the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., the New York Civil Liberties Union, and the workers’ rights firm of Vladeck, Waldman, Elias and Englehard, P.C. Her first job after law school was as a staff attorney in the South Brooklyn Legal Services Housing Unit. Her areas of expertise include housing law and access to justice, and she can be reached at sabbeth@unc.edu.

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Natsu Taylor Saito (J.D. Yale, 1987) is a professor of law at Georgia State University’s College of Law in Atlanta, where she has taught courses related to international law, human rights, and racial justice since 1994. She has published over twenty law review articles as well as two books,Meeting the Enemy: American Exceptionalism and International Law (NYU Press, 2010) and From Chinese Exclusion to Guantánamo Bay:  Plenary Power and the Prerogative State (Univ. Press of Colorado, 2006). Professor Saito is currently writing a book on racial hierarchy as a function of American settler colonialism (forthcoming, NYU Press).  Her scholarship is available here. She served on the Board of Governors of the Society of American Law Teachers (SALT) for over a decade, was a founding member of the Conference of Asian Pacific American Law Faculty, and founding president of the Georgia Chapter of the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association. Areas of expertise include race, citizenship, and the rights of Indigenous peoples; national security and political repression; and international human rights remedies for race-based injustices. She can be reached atnsaito@gsu.edu.

Shoshanna Silverberg’s background in cannabis began on the advocacy and civil liberties side, lobbying for groups such as the ACLU and providing research and analysis for the state on arrests in schools and prisoner re-entry. She has sat on the boards of reproductive justice organizations, on a Juvenile Review Board employing a Balanced and Restorative Approach to Justice, and on legislative bodies such as sentencing task forces and oversight committees charged with implementing criminal justice reform measures.  Shoshanna holds a Bachelor’s Degree from Hampshire College, a Master of Arts in Holistic Thinking, and a Juris Doctor from Elon University School of Law, where she was an active legal observer and served as Communications Chair for Elon’s and a coalition of North Carolina NLG chapters. Shoshanna has been a featured blogger on CuttingEdgeLaw.com and Ms. JD. She has twice been a guest lecturer for the New Paradigms in Law class offered at the Touro Law Center in Central Islip, New York, has lectured for Pepperdine University’s Department of Public Policy and most recently, for a Marijuana Law course offered at Rutgers University School of Law in Camden, NJ. She was a contributing author to Lawyers as Changemakers: The Global Integrative Law Movement, published by the ABA in 2016, currently lives in Nevada, and will join the New Mexico Bar in 2020. Shoshanna’s industry experience on the business side of the cannabis space began in 2015 when she moved from North Carolina to Nevada to work with the original team at the advisory firm Electrum Partners, overseeing government affairs throughout the ballot initiatives of 2016. Shoshanna was a core team member of the legal tech platform CannaRegs, going on to provide business development services for companies and not-for-profit entities in and entering the cannabis industry, from legal trade organizations to digital security firms and many in between. A regular contributor to publications such as Elevate NV, Conscious Company Media, and CBD Health & Wellness, since 2018 Shoshanna has been the Director of Strategy for Pistil + Stigma, a woman-owned and operated lobbying and consulting firm focused on choice, advocacy and business advisory services in emerging plant industries. Areas of expertise include Drug Policy Reform; Cannabis Compliance (local, state, federal); Comparative International Cannabis Law; Emerging Plant Economies & Legal/Advocacy Frameworks; Intersections of Business Law & Policy with Civil Liberties, Patient, & Consumer Rights; Career Dev in Cannabis; Social Justice & Equity in Cannabis; Conflicts of Law & Constitutional Issues in Cannabis; Family & Employment related policy & law in Cannabis; and Intellectual Property/Alternative Theories in the Cannabis Space. She can be reached at info@snsmjconsulting.com.

Azadeh Shahshahani serves as Legal & Advocacy Director with Project South. Azadeh has worked for a number of years in the U.S. South to protect and defend immigrants and Muslim, Middle Eastern, and South Asian communities. She previously served as National Security/Immigrants’ Rights Project Director with the ACLU of Georgia. Azadeh is a NLG past president, and serves on the Advisory Council of the American Association of Jurists and on the Board of Directors of Defending Rights and Dissent. She is active in support of social justice movements in the Global South and has served as a trial monitor in Turkey, an election monitor in Venezuela and Honduras, and as a member of the jury in people’s tribunals on Mexico, the Philippines, and Brazil. She has also participated in international fact-finding delegations to post-revolutionary Tunisia and Egypt as well as a delegation focused on the situation of Palestinian political prisoners. Azadeh is the author or editor of several human rights reports, including a 2017 report titled “Imprisoned Justice: Inside Two Georgia Immigrant Detention Centers,” as well as law review articles and book chapters focused on racial profiling, immigrants’ rights, and surveillance of Muslim-Americans. Her writings have appeared in the Guardian, the Nation, MSNBC, Time Magazine, Slate, USA Today, Aljazeera, and the Huffington Post, among others. Azadeh received her JD from the University of Michigan Law School where she was Article Editor for The Michigan Journal of International Law. She also has a Master’s in Modern Middle Eastern and North African Studies from the University of Michigan. Azadeh is the recipient of the Shanara M. Gilbert Human Rights Award from the Society of American Law Teachers, the National Lawyers Guild Ernie Goodman Award, the Emory Law School Outstanding Leadership in the Public Interest Award, the Emory University MLK Jr. Community Service Award, the Distinguished Leader Award from the Fulton County Daily Report, the US Human Rights Network Human Rights Movement Builder Award, the American Immigration Lawyers Association Advocacy Award, and the University of Georgia Law School Equal Justice Foundation Public Interest Practitioner Award, among several others. She has also been recognized as an Abolitionist by the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University & the Frederick Douglass Family Initiatives, and as one of Atlanta’s 500 Most Powerful Leaders by Atlanta Magazine.  In 2016, Azadeh was chosen by the Mundo Hispanico Newspaper as an Outstanding Person of the Year for defending the rights of immigrants in Georgia.  In 2017, she was chosen by Georgia Trend Magazine as one of the 40 under 40 notable Georgians. Azadeh can be reached at azadeh@projectsouth.org.

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Colin Starger is an Associate Professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law. A longtime Guild member and former vice-president of the New York City chapter, Starger teaches Constitutional Law, Civil Procedure, Jurisprudence and Legal Research and Writing. Starting in the Fall of 2016, Starger will be running a Mass Incarceration Clinic at UB, which will initially focus on challenging bail practice in Baltimore. After graduating from Columbia Law in 2002, Starger clerked for the Honorable Michael Dolinger in the Southern District of New York and then served as a Staff Attorney at the Innocence Project at Cardozo Law School. At the Innocence Project, Starger was lead counsel on four DNA exonerations including one from Oklahoma’s death row. Starger is the principal investigator on the SCOTUS Mapping Project, a software-driven effort to map Supreme Court doctrine. A member of the New York and Maryland bars, Starger is the Mass Defense liaison for the Maryland NLG chapter and a member of the Baltimore Action Legal Team (BALT). His scholarly papers are available on the Social Science Research Network website. Areas of expertise include DNA and post-conviction innocence litigation, Constitutional Law (especially First Amendment), and Legal Informatics (including data visualization). He can be reached at cstarger@ubalt.edu.

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Philip L. Torrey is a Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School, a Senior Clinical Instructor with the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program, and the Supervising Attorney for the Harvard Immigration Project. At HLS, he teaches a course concerning the intersection of criminal law and immigration law that includes both doctrinal issues concerning the immigration consequences of criminal activity and policy issues concerning the conflation of the immigration law and criminal law systems. His research and scholarship focus on immigration detention, the private prison industry’s influence on immigration detention policies, the role of discretion in crime-based removal proceedings, and the immigration system’s mandatory detention regime.  Mr. Torrey also supervises the Crimmigration Clinic at the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program. The Crimmigration Clinic provides Padilla advice to local criminal defense attorneys, as well as federal appellate litigation support, and policy advocacy concerning immigration detention issues. Mr. Torrey previously worked as an attorney in the Immigration Unit of Greater Boston Legal Services. He received his B.A. from Colgate University and his J.D. with honors from the University of Connecticut School of Law. He can be reached at ptorrey@law.harvard.edu.

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Rob Walker has extensive experience providing legal counsel on intellectual property and related technology issues. He has published widely on copyright and privacy law, and his work has been cited as authority in a published opinion of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. Publications include Unavoidable Aesthetic Judgments in Copyright Law: A Community of Practice Standard, Negotiating the Unknown: A Compulsory Licensing Solution to the Orphan Works Problem, Copyright False Positives, and The Right to be Forgotten. He is a Magna Cum Laude graduate of the University of California Hastings College of the Law, and has a B.A. from the University of Virginia. In private practice, Rob has drafted and negotiated countless intellectual property licenses, has litigated cancellation and opposition proceedings before the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board, and has successfully resolved numerous copyright and trademark enforcement matters on behalf of major music and apparel brands. He also has substantial experience providing business counseling and strategic advice, specifically for early-stage technology and media ventures. Prior to becoming a lawyer, Robert worked for six years in broadcast television and Internet media as an audio/video producer and project manager. Areas of expertise include intellectual property law, specifically copyright, trademark, and rights of publicity. Rob can be reached at rkwalker3@gmail.com or 415-696-0658.

Carl Williams is a movement lawyer, organizer and scholar-activist dedicated to creating the conditions where people are free from all systems of oppression. Carl has practiced criminal and civil rights law in Massachusetts for over twelve years. He began his legal career as a criminal defense attorney with the Committee for Public Counsel Services, recently served as a racial justice attorney with the ACLU of Massachusetts. A long-time resident of Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood, Carl is an activist, organizer and public advocate on issues of war, immigrants’ rights, LGBTQ rights, and for Black and Palestinian liberation. He is member of the National Lawyers Guild, and currently serves as co-chair of its Massachusetts Board of Directors. Carl was part of the legal defense for the the Occupy Boston movement, providing legal, bail, and court support and training to the thousands of participant-organizers. In 2015, he served on the working group that organized the inaugural Law for Black Lives convening, and was a featured speaker in its RadTalks event. Recently, Carl was a Givelber Distinguished Lecturer on Public Interest Law at Northeastern University School of Law, where he taught on social justice movements and the law. As of the fall of 2018, Carl is a practitioner-in-residence at Cornell Law teaching a course on the history and theory of movement lawyering. Carl is a graduate of the University of Rhode Island and the University of Wisconsin Law School. Areas of expertise include racial justice, civil rights, criminal and protest defense, legal observer, Know Your Rights training, and movement lawyering. He can be reached at carltonewilliams@gmail.com and tweets at @carltonwilliams.