Vanita Gupta currently serves as Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General and head of Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). Under Ms. Gupta’s leadership, the Division continues its crucially important work in a number of areas, including advancing constitutional policing and other criminal justice reforms, ensuring that individuals with disabilities are afforded an opportunity to live in integrated community settings, protecting the rights of LGBTI individuals, and combating discrimination in lending and voting.
Ms. Gupta is a longtime civil rights lawyer. Prior to joining DOJ, she was Deputy Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union and Director of its Center for Justice. While managing a robust litigation docket, Vanita also worked with law enforcement, departments of corrections, and across the political spectrum to advance evidence-based reforms to increase public safety by promoting greater fairness and trust in our criminal justice system. From 2006-2010, Vanita was a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Racial Justice Program. She won a landmark settlement on behalf of immigrant children detained in a privately-run prison in Texas that led to the end of “family detention” at the facility. Prior to that, she worked at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund where she successfully led the effort to overturn the wrongful drug convictions of 38 individuals in Tulia, Texas, who were ultimately pardoned by Governor Rick Perry. She then helped negotiate a $6 million settlement on behalf of her clients. Vanita also served for several years as an adjunct clinical professor at NYU School of Law, where she taught and oversaw a civil rights litigation clinic.
Vanita has won numerous awards for her advocacy and has been quoted extensively in national and international media on civil rights issues. In 2011, the National Law Journal recognized her as a Top 40 Minority Lawyer Under 40. Vanita is a magna cum laude graduate of Yale University and received her law degree from New York University School of Law.
An immensely talented and creative scholar, Professor Teachout brings a rich background in laws governing political behavior, both domestically and abroad, as well as the insights of her original work on corruption and its constitutional history in Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin's Snuff Box to Citizens United (Harvard University Press, 2014).
In July 2015 she was named CEO and chair of the US-based anti-corruption nonprofit Mayday PAC, replacing Lawrence Lessig. In 2014, she ran for the Democratic Party nomination for Governor of New York, losing to incumbent Governor Andrew Cuomo. Professor Teachout has also taught at Duke University and the University of Vermont, in addition to serving as the National Director of the Sunlight Foundation.
Teachout attended Yale University, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1993. She went on to receive a Juris Doctorate, summa cum laude, from Duke University and a Master of Arts in political science from Duke University in 1999. After attaining her law degree, she clerked for Chief Judge Edward Roy Becker of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
Justice Goodwin Liu is an Associate Justice of the California Supreme Court. He was confirmed to office by a unanimous vote of the California Commission on Judicial Appointments on August 31, 2011, following his appointment by Governor Edmund G. Brown, Jr. on July 26, 2011. The Governor administered the oath of office to Justice Liu in a public ceremony in Sacramento, California on September 1, 2011. Before joining the court, Justice Liu was Professor of Law and former Associate Dean at the UC Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall).
The son of Taiwanese immigrants, Justice Liu grew up in Sacramento, where he attended public schools. He went to Stanford University and earned a bachelor’s degree in biology in 1991. He attended Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship and earned a Masters degree in philosophy and physiology. Upon returning to the United States, he went to Washington D.C. to help launch the AmeriCorps national service program and worked for two years as a senior program officer at the Corporation for National Service.
Justice Liu graduated from Yale Law School in 1998, becoming the first in his family to earn a law degree. He clerked for Judge David Tatel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and then worked as Special Assistant to the Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education, where he developed and coordinated K-12 education policy. He went on to clerk at the U.S. Supreme Court for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg during the October 2000 Term. In 2001, he joined the appellate litigation practice of O’Melveny & Myers in Washington, D.C.
Justice Liu is a prolific and influential scholar on constitutional law and education policy. His 2006 article, “Education, Equality, and National Citizenship,” won the Steven S. Goldberg Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Education Law, conferred by the Education Law Association. Justice Liu is also a popular and acclaimed teacher. In 2009, he received UC Berkeley’s Distinguished Teaching Award, the university’s most prestigious honor for individual excellence in teaching. The Boalt Hall Class of 2009 selected him as the faculty commencement speaker.
David Singh Grewal is an Associate Professor of Law at Yale Law School. His teaching and research interests include legal and political theory; global economic governance, particularly international trade law; intellectual property law and biotechnology; and law and economics. Before joining the faculty, he was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard University Society of Fellows. His first book, Network Power: The Social Dynamics of Globalization, was published by Yale University Press in 2008. His second book, The Invention of the Economy: The Origins of Economic Thought is forthcoming from Harvard University Press. He is a Faculty Fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School and a member of the board of directors of the BioBricks Foundation. He holds B.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard and a J.D. from Yale Law School.
Jacob S. Hacker, Ph.D., is the Director of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies, and Stanley B. Resor Professor of Political Science at Yale University. He is also a board member of The Century Foundation, Economic Policy Institute, The American Prospect, and a member of the Scholars Strategy Network steering committee, and a former Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows.
An expert on the politics of U.S. health and social policy, he is the author of Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, written with Paul Pierson (2010, paperback 2011), The Great Risk Shift: The New Economic Insecurity and the Decline of the American Dream (2006, paperback 2008), The Divided Welfare State: The Battle over Public and Private Social Benefits in the United States (2002), and The Road to Nowhere: The Genesis of President Clinton's Plan for Health Security (1997), co-winner of the Brownlow Book Award of the National Academy of Public Administration. He is also co-author, with Paul Pierson, of Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy (2005) and has edited three volumes—most recently, Shared Responsibility, Shared Risk: Government, Markets, and Social Policy in the Twenty-First Century, edited with Ann O' Leary (2012).
James Kwak is a prolific writer and blogger whose wide range of scholarly interests includes corporate law and governance, financial markets and regulation, retirement security, and fiscal policy. He is the co-author (with Simon Johnson) of two best-selling books – White House Burning: The Founding Fathers, Our National Debt, and Why It Matters to You and Thirteen Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown – the author of numerous scholarly and popular articles and book chapters, an online columnist for The Atlantic, and the co-author of “The Baseline Scenario,” a leading blog on economics and public policy.
The holder of a Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Berkeley, Professor Kwak spent more than a decade in the business world before a growing interest in the law led him to begin work on his J.D. at Yale Law School in 2008. His business experience includes working as a management consultant at McKinsey and Company, serving as director of marketing at Ariba, and co-founding and serving as vice president of Guidewire Software, a leading provider of core systems for property and casualty insurance companies.
During the 2011-2012 academic year, Professor Kwak, a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, served as a fellow at the Harvard Law School Program on Corporate Governance.
Jedediah Purdy teaches constitutional, environmental, and property law and writes in all of these areas. He also teaches legal theory and writes on issues at the intersection of law and social and political thought.
He is the author of four books, including a trilogy on American political identity, which concluded with A Tolerable Anarchy (2009), all from Knopf. The Meaning of Property appeared in 2010 from Yale University Press. He has published many essays in publications including The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Op-Ed Page and Book Review, Die Zeit, and Democracy Journal, and his legal scholarship has appeared in the Yale Law Journal, University of Chicago Law Review, Duke Law Journal, Cornell Law Review, and Harvard Environmental Law Review, among others. He is now at work on After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene, under contract with Harvard University Press.
Purdy graduated from Harvard College, summa cum laude, with an A.B. in Social Studies, and received his J.D. from Yale Law School.
He clerked for Judge Pierre N. Leval of the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York City and has been a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, an ethics fellow at Harvard University, and a visiting professor at Yale Law School, Harvard Law School, Virginia Law School, and the Georgetown University Law Center.
Wendy R. Weiser directs the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, a non-partisan think tank and public interest law center that focuses on fundamental issues of democracy and justice. The Democracy Program focuses on issues of voting rights and elections, money in politics, redistricting and representation, government dysfunction, and fair courts. She founded and directed the center’s Voting Rights and Elections Project, directing litigation, research, and advocacy efforts to enhance political participation and prevent voter disenfranchisement across the country, protecting hundreds of thousands of voters in 2006, 2008, 2010, and 2012.
She has authored a number of nationally-recognized publications and articles on voting rights and election reform, including Voting Law Changes in 2012, litigated ground-breaking voting rights lawsuits; testified before both houses of Congress and in a variety of state legislatures; and provided policy and legislative drafting assistance to federal and state legislators and administrators across the country. She is a frequent public speaker and media contributor on democracy issues. She has appeared on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, PBS, ABC News, and NPR; her commentary has been published in The New York Times, USA Today, U.S. News & World Report, Roll Call, The Hill, Huffington Post, and elsewhere; and she is frequently quoted by The New York Times, the Washington Post, the National Journal, Politico, and other news outlets across the country.
Previously, Ms. Weiser directed the center’s Fair Courts Project, which seeks to preserve a fair and impartial judiciary. She also served as an Adjunct Professor at NYU School of Law, where she taught the Brennan Center Public Policy Advocacy Clinic. Prior to joining the Brennan Center, Ms. Weiser was a senior attorney at NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund, where she worked on issues of access to the courts and domestic violence, a litigation associate at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, and a law clerk to Judge Eugene H. Nickerson in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York. She received her J.D. from Yale Law School and her B.A. from Yale College.
Robert Hockett joined the Cornell Law Faculty in 2004. His principal teaching, research, and writing interests lie in the fields of organizational, financial, and monetary law and economics in both their positive and normative, as well as their national and transnational, dimensions. His guiding concern in these fields is with the legal and institutional prerequisites to a just, prosperous, and sustainable economic order.
A Fellow of the Century Foundation and regular commissioned author for the New America Foundation, Hockett also does regular consulting work for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the International Monetary Fund, Americans for Financial Reform, the 'Occupy' Cooperative, and a number of federal and state legislators and local governments.
Prior to doing his doctoral work and entering academe, he worked for the International Monetary Fund and clerked for the Honorable Deanell Reece Tacha, Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.
Amy Kapczynski is a Professor of Law at Yale Law School and faculty director of the Global Health Justice Partnership. She joined the Yale Law faculty in January 2012. Her areas of research including information policy, intellectual property law, international law, and global health. Prior to coming to Yale, she taught at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. She also served as a law clerk to Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Stephen G. Breyer at the U.S. Supreme Court, and to Judge Guido Calabresi on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. She received her A.B. from Princeton University, M. Phil. from Cambridge University, M.A. from Queen Mary and Westfield College at University of London, and J.D. from Yale Law School.
Barry Lynn directs the Open Markets, and is a senior fellow at New America. He is author of Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction (Wiley 2010) and End of the Line: The Rise and Coming Fall of the Global Corporation (Doubleday 2005). Lynn’s groundbreaking writings on interdependence among nations and the growing fragility of complex industrial systems have attracted wide attention, and he has presented his work to high officials in China, Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Taiwan, and the European Commission, as well as in the White House and U.S. Treasury Department.
Lynn’s writings on the political and economic effects of the extreme consolidation of power in the U.S. have influenced the thinking of policymakers and antitrust professionals on both sides of the Atlantic. His work has been profiled on CBS and in the New York Times, and his articles have appeared in publications including Harper’s, the Financial Times, Harvard Business Review, and Foreign Policy. He has appeared on CBS, PBS, CNN, the BBC, NPR, MSNBC, C-Span, and the Christian Broadcasting Network, among others. Prior to joining New America, Lynn was executive editor of Global Business Magazine for seven years, and worked as a correspondent in Peru, Venezuela, and the Caribbean for the Associated Press and Agence France Presse.
Saule Omarova specializes in regulation of financial institutions, banking law, international finance, and corporate finance. Before joining Cornell Law School in 2014, she was the George R. Ward Associate Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina School of Law.
Prior to joining academia, Professor Omarova practiced law in the Financial Institutions Group of Davis, Polk, & Wardwell, a premier New York law firm, where she specialized in a wide variety of corporate transactions and advisory work in the area of financial regulation. In 2006-2007, she served at the U.S. Department of the Treasury as a Special Advisor for Regulatory Policy to the Under Secretary for Domestic Finance.
Frank Pasquale’s research addresses the challenges posed to information law by rapidly changing technology, particularly in the health care, internet, and finance industries. He is a member of the NSF-funded Council for Big Data, Ethics, and Society, and an Affiliate Fellow of Yale Law School’s Information Society Project. He frequently presents on the ethical, legal, and social implications of information technology for attorneys, physicians, and other health professionals. His book The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms that Control Money and Information (Harvard University Press, 2015) develops a social theory of reputation, search, and finance.
Pasquale has been a Visiting Fellow at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology, and a Visiting Professor at Yale Law School and Cardozo Law School. He was a Marshall Scholar at Oxford University. He has testified before the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives, appearing with the General Counsels of Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. He has also presented before a Department of Health & Human Services/Federal Trade Commission Roundtable and panels of the National Academy of Sciences. He served on an American Academy of Arts and Sciences working group on the future of mobile health (mHealth) regulation. He has received a commission from Triple Canopy to write and present on the political economy of automation.
Pasquale serves on the Advisory Boards of the Data Competition Institute, Patient Privacy Rights and the Electronic Privacy Information Center. He is on the editorial boards of the Journal of Legal Education and the Oxford Handbooks Online in Law. He has served on the executive board of the Health Law Section of the American Association of Law Schools (AALS), and has served as chair of the AALS section on Privacy and Defamation. He has been quoted in the Financial Times, New York Times, Economist, CNN, and many other media outlets.
Deepak Gupta is the founding principal of Gupta Wessler PLLC. He specializes in Supreme Court and appellate litigation on a wide range of issues, with an emphasis on constitutional law, class actions, access to civil justice, and consumers’ and workers’ rights. He has also taught courses on public interest law and appellate advocacy as an Adjunct Professor of Law at both Georgetown and American universities.
He has handled over 100 appeals, and has briefed or argued cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, all of the federal circuits, federal district courts nationwide, and seven state supreme courts. He has successfully opposed dozens of significant petitions for certiorari in the Supreme Court, preserving important victories for plaintiffs and the public interest. In a small number of cases, Deepak also works with clients and co-counsel to initiate constitutional challenges and class actions from the ground up.
Before founding the firm in 2012, Deepak served as Senior Litigation Counsel and Senior Counsel for Enforcement Strategy at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau during the agency’s historic founding. As the first appellate litigator hired under Elizabeth Warren’s leadership, he was instrumental in launching the Bureau’s amicus program, defending its regulations in court, and working with the Solicitor General’s office on Supreme Court matters. For seven years previously, Deepak was an attorney at Public Citizen Litigation Group, where he founded and directed the Consumer Justice Project and was the Alan Morrison Supreme Court Project Fellow.
During law school, Deepak worked on voting rights litigation at the U.S. Department of Justice, church-state litigation at Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and prisoners’ rights litigation at the American Civil Liberties Union, and then spent two years as a law clerk to the Honorable Lawrence K. Karlton of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California. He received his law degree from Georgetown, studied Sanskrit for one year at Oxford, and received his undergraduate degree in philosophy from Fordham.
Hannah Lieberman joined NLSP in late March 2012, bringing extensive experience as a litigator, advocate for low-income persons and legal services manager to the position.
In 1992, she left her position as a litigation Partner at the Washington, DC law firm of Shaw Pittman Potts & Trowbridge (now Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman) to become the Director of Advocacy for Community Legal Services (CLS) in Arizona, a multi-county civil legal services program. She left CLS in 1998 to become the Director of Advocacy (and later Deputy Executive Director) of the Legal Aid Bureau, Maryland’s statewide civil legal services program. At Legal Aid, she supervised delivery of the program’s wide range of legal services, led teams of lawyers in complex state and federal cases, supervised an active appellate practice and spearheaded community listening and other strategic efforts. After 10 years at Legal Aid, Hannah started her own consulting firm, working with legal services organizations across the country on strengthening strategic advocacy, evaluation, planning and training. She has practiced in virtually all of the areas of a traditional legal services practice, including housing, consumer, public benefits, health, family, juvenile rights, education and employment law.
Hannah believes that a truly great legal services program is deeply engaged in and with the communities it serves, committed to providing excellent service to address the most pressing needs of low-income individuals and families, and actively pursues solutions to overcome recurrent or systemic barriers facing low-income persons and communities.
Judith Resnik is the Arthur Liman Professor of Law at Yale Law School, where she teaches about federalism, procedure, courts, prisons, equality, and citizenship. She is the founding director of the Liman Program, supporting fellowships for law graduates and summer fellowships at six colleges, and sponsoring colloquia on the civil and criminal justice systems. In 2015, the Liman Program joined with the Association of State Correctional Administrators in co-authoring Time-in-Cell: The Liman-ASCA 2014 National Survey of Administrative Segregation in Prison. The report is the first to provide updated information, as of the fall of 2014, on both the numbers of people and the conditions in restrictive housing nationwide.
Professor Resnik's books include Representing Justice: Invention, Controversy, and Rights in City-States and Democratic Courtrooms (with Dennis Curtis, Yale University Press, 2011); Federal Courts Stories (co-edited with Vicki C. Jackson, Foundation Press 2010); and Migrations and Mobilities: Citizenship, Borders, and Gender (co-edited with Seyla Benhabib, NYU, 2009). Recent articles include Diffusing Disputes: The Public in the Private of Arbitration, the Private in Courts, and the Erasure of Rights (Yale Law Journal); and Globalization(s), privatization(s), constitutionalization, and statization: Icons and experiences of sovereignty in the 21st century (International Journal of Constitutional Law, 2013).
Professor Resnik has chaired the Sections on Procedure, on Federal Courts, and on Women in Legal Education of the American Association of Law Schools. She is a Managerial Trustee of the International Association of Women Judges. Professor Resnik served as a founder and as a co-chair of the Women's Faculty Forum, begun in 2001. Professor Resnik chairs Yale’s Global Constitutional Law Seminar, a part of the Gruber Program on Global Justice and Women’s Rights.
Prior to joining the ACLU, Williamson served as a litigation associate at the law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP in New York and began his legal career in New Orleans, first as a staff attorney for the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana and later as a defense attorney and founding member of Juvenile Regional Services.
Williamson received his his J.D. from New York University School of Law and Bachelor’s degree from Harvard University.
Professor Jordan is best known for establishing the field of economic justice in legal theory, and for her work in financial services and civil rights. She recently released the second edition of her textbook, Economic Justice: Race, Gender, Identity and Economics (2011), which is a capstone to a series of articles, chapters, and books she has written on the subject, which include: “The Short End of The Stick: The Role of Race in Law, Markets and Social Structures” (2009); Beyond Rational Choice: Alternative Perspectives on Economics (2006); A Woman's Place is in the Marketplace: Gender and Economics (2006); When Markets Fail: Race and Economics (2006); Cultural Economics: Markets and Culture (2006). Her forthcoming projects concern economic justice and the impact of asymmetric legal representation in the foreclosure crisis, At the Law Center she teaches courses in Federal Regulation of Banking: Modern Financial Institutions and Change; Commercial Law: Payments and Secured Transactions, and Contemporary Issues in Economic Justice.
Before coming to Georgetown, she taught for twelve years at the University of California, Davis. She began her teaching career at Stanford Law School as a teaching fellow. She has been active in the financial services field, serving as chair of the Financial Institutions Committee of the California State Bar, drafter of the statute to regulate bank check holding practices, and co-counsel in class actions challenging bank stop-payment fee charges. Her article, "Ending the Floating Check Game" grew out of this involvement. She organized the Financial Institutions and Consumer Financial Services section of the AALS.
She is a past-president of both the Association of American Law Schools and the Society of American Law Teachers. She was elected to membership in the American Law Institute in 1984. Professor Jordan graduated first in her class at Howard University School of Law, serving as editor-in-chief of the Howard Law Journal. She received her B.A. from San Francisco State University. She was a White House Fellow in 1980-81, serving as special assistant to the Attorney General of the United States. She was counsel to Professor Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings.
Gerald Torres is a leading figure in critical race theory, environmental law and federal Indian Law. He previously served as the Bryant Smith Chair in Law at the University of Texas School of Law and taught at The University of Minnesota Law School, where he served as Associate Dean. He is also a former president of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS). Torres has served as deputy assistant attorney general for the Environment and Natural Resources Division of the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., and as counsel to then U.S. attorney general Janet Reno.
His book, The Miner's Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy (Harvard University Press, 2002) with Harvard law professor Lani Guinier, was described by Publisher's Weekly as "one of the most provocative and challenging books on race produced in years." Torres' many articles include "Translation and Stories" (Harvard Law Review, 2002), "Who Owns the Sky?" (Pace Law Review, 2001) (Garrison Lecture),"Taking and Giving: Police Power, Public Value, and Private Right" (Environmental Law, 1996), and "Translating Yonnondio by Precedent and Evidence: The Mashpee Indian Case" (Duke Law Journal, 1990).
Torres has served on the board of the Environmental Law Institute, the National Petroleum Council and on EPA's National Environmental Justice Advisory Council. He is currently Vice Chair of Earth Day Network and Board Chair of the Advancement Project as well as serving on the Board of the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Texas League of Conservation Voters. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Law Institute. Torres was honored with the 2004 Legal Service Award from the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) for his work to advance the legal rights of Latinos.
He has been a visiting professor at Harvard, Stanford and Yale Law Schools.
Michelle Wilde Anderson is a public law scholar and practitioner focused on state and local government, including urban policy, city planning, local democracy, and public finance. Her work combines legal analysis with the details of human experience to understand the local governance of high poverty areas, both urban and rural, and the legal causes of concentrated poverty and fiscal crisis. Her current research explores legal restructuring (such as bankruptcy, disincorporation, and receiverships) for cities and counties in distress—issues that affect not only Rust Belt capitals such as Detroit, but also post-industrial cities in California, rural areas in Oregon, and small towns across the Northeast and South. These issues are examined in her recent publications including “The New Minimal Cities,” Yale Law Journal (2014); “Detroit: What a City Owes its Residents,” Los Angeles Times (2013); “Making a Regional School District: Memphis City Schools Dissolves into its Suburbs,” Columbia Law Review Sidebar (2012); and “Dissolving Cities,” Yale Law Journal (2012).
Prior to joining Stanford Law School in 2014, Anderson was an assistant professor of law at Berkeley Law School. Additionally, she has been a research fellow at the European Commission’s Urban Policy Unit in Brussels, an environmental law fellow at Shute, Mihaly, & Weinberger, and a member of the faculty executive committee of the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice at Berkeley Law. She clerked for Judge Guido Calabresi on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and Judge Marilyn Hall Patel of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Anderson is a member of the board of directors of the National Housing Law Project and the East Bay Community Law Center.
Henry Fernandez is a Senior Fellow at American Progress focusing on state and municipal policy, with a specific interest in how these impact the civil rights and economic opportunities for Americans.
He is CEO of Fernandez Advisors, LLC, a strategic and management consulting firm counseling nonprofits, businesses, grassroots movements, foundations, and government agencies. Fernandez was the founding executive director of LEAP, a nationally recognized child development program serving low-income youth, primarily public-housing residents, in Connecticut. Fernandez served on the Obama transition team based at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development where he concentrated on the affordable housing, homelessness, and community development portfolios.
Fernandez has worked broadly in local government, including as economic development administrator for New Haven, Connecticut, where he oversaw the city’s seven development departments as well as the Port Authority, Development Commission, and Redevelopment Agency.
He has managed and helped lead local and state electoral campaigns in Connecticut and Massachusetts, from city council to governor’s races. He has developed large-scale voter registration programs in the United States and advised election monitoring groups in East Africa.
Fernandez graduated from Yale Law School and Harvard College. He taught high school in Zimbabwe, worked for a rural organizing group in Mississippi, and was the Stupski fellow at Yale Law School. He has served on numerous boards and commissions, including the National Commission on Civic Renewal; the Center for Community Change; the Connecticut Commission on Arts, Culture, and Tourism; and the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. He currently serves as the chair of both America’s Voice and America’s Voice Education Fund in Washington, D.C., and is a board member of the National Hispanic Media Coalition in Los Angeles as well as Junta For Progressive Action in New Haven, Connecticut.
Benjamin Sachs is the Kestnbaum Professor of Labor and Industry at Harvard Law School and a leading expert in the field of labor law and labor relations. Professor Sachs teaches courses in labor law, employment law, and law and social change, and his writing focuses on union organizing and unions in American politics. Prior to joining the Harvard faculty in 2008, Professor Sachs was the Joseph Goldstein Fellow at Yale Law School. From 2002-2006, he served as Assistant General Counsel of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in Washington, D.C., and from 1999-2002 he was an attorney at Make the Road by Walking, a membership-based community organization in Brooklyn, NY. Professor Sachs graduated from Yale Law School in 1998, and served as a judicial law clerk to the Honorable Stephen Reinhardt of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. His writing has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the Columbia Law Review, the New York Times and elsewhere. Professor Sachs received the Yale Law School teaching award in 2007 and in 2013 received the Sacks-Freund Award for Teaching Excellence at Harvard Law School.
Professor Fishkin's research and teaching interests include employment discrimination, election law, education law, constitutional law, torts, and distributive justice. He is particularly interested in questions of equality and equal opportunity at the intersection of law and political theory. His book, Bottlenecks: A New Theory of Equal Opportunity, is just out from Oxford University Press. His forthcoming article with Willy Forbath, The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution, is the first installment of a joint project that will become a book, The Constitution of Opportunity, under contract with Harvard University Press. His article, The Anti-Bottleneck Principle in Employment Discrimination Law, will appear in the Washington University Law Review in 2014. His essay, The Dignity of the South, appeared last year in the Yale Law Journal Online.
Professor Fishkin received a B.A. in Ethics, Politics, and Economics from Yale University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He received a D. Phil. in Politics from Oxford University, where he was a Fulbright Scholar. After law school he clerked for Chief Justice Margaret Marshall of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. Before joining the UT faculty, he was a Ruebhausen Fellow at Yale Law School.
He blogs regularly at Balkinization.
Professor Forbath came to Texas in 1997 after more than a decade on the faculties of law and history at UCLA. Among the nation's leading legal and constitutional historians, he is the author of Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement (Harvard, 1991), the forthcoming The Constitution of Opportunity (Harvard,2015) (with Joseph Fishkin) and dozens of articles, book chapters, and essays on legal and constitutional history and theory. His scholarly work appears in Yale Law Journal, Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, Law and Social Inquiry, and the Journal of American History; his journalism atPolitico.com and in the New York Times, American Prospect and the Nation. His current research concerns social and economic rights in the courts and social movements of the Southern Hemisphere, and Jews, law and identity politics in the Progressive Era. Professor Forbath visited at Columbia Law School in 2001-02 and at Harvard Law School in 2008-09. He is on the Editorial Boards of Law & History, Law & Social Inquiry: Journal of the American Bar Foundation, and other journals, and on the Board of Directors of the American Society for Legal History, Texas Low-Income Housing Information Services, and other public interest organizations.
Martha McCluskey’s teaching has included courses on constitutional law, torts, insurance, regulation, economic inequality and the relationships between work and family. She earned a J.D. from Yale Law School and a J.S.D. with distinction from Columbia Law School. Before entering academia she was an attorney for the Maine Public Advocate Office.
McCluskey’s scholarship examines the relationship between economics and inequality in law. She is working on a book titled A Field Guide to Law, Economics and Justice. Earlier publications include a major study of workers’ compensation reform laws, several articles analyzing workers’ compensation insurance regulation, and articles on welfare policy and social citizenship. Much of her work explores the connections between economics and feminist legal theory. She is the co-editor of Feminism, Media, and the Law (Oxford University Press, 1997).
Another strand of McCluskey’s work builds on critical legal analysis of gender and race to develop the jurisprudence of disability and of economic class by addressing economic ideology. She is a co-organizer of the ClassCrits project, which brings together scholars in law, economics and other disciplines to develop a critical legal analysis of economic inequality through workshops, conference panels, scholarly publications and a blog.
K. Sabeel Rahman is an Assistant Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School, and a Four Freedoms Center Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. His interests revolve around issues of inclusive and equitable economic policy; democratic participation; law; and social and democratic theory.
He is the Research and Design Director for and a member of the founding leadership of the Gettysburg Project, a new initiative backed with seed funding from the Ford Foundation and others to create an innovation hub linking leading practitioners and scholars in the fields of community organizing, civic engagement, and social movements. In 2014 he served as a Special Advisor in the de Blasio administration in New York City, leading an inter-agency strategy and design process to help formulate a long-term, inclusive economic development agenda for the city.
Sabeel’s current book project explores the prospects for meaningful democracy in United States, in context of the “new Gilded Age” of economic inequality and upheaval, particularly in the aftermath of the 2008-9 financial crisis.
He has previously worked as a researcher and advisor in the Democracy Program at theBrennan Center for Justice, and the Governance Lab @ NYU, a hub for research and innovation on civic technology and democratic participation.
Sabeel holds a Ph.D from the Department of Government at Harvard University (2013), a J.D. from Harvard Law School (cum laude 2012), and an A.B. summa cum laude in Social Studies from Harvard College. He also holds an M.Sc in Economics for Development (Distinction), and a M.St in Sociolegal Studies from the University of Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. He has previously been the Reginald Lewis Fellow at Harvard Law School (2012-2014); a Graduate Fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics (2010-11), and a fellow at Harvard University Center for American Political Studies(2011-12). He is also a member of the Tobin Project‘s scholar network.