Conference Program 11-18-15

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Dear Conference Participants,
Welcome to Duke Law School and The Present and Future of Civil Rights
Movements: Race and Reform in 21st
Century America conference. These are indeed
turbulent times, and we are pleased that you have come from near and far to explore
ways to work through the present moment and to carve pathways for a better
tomorrow. We look forward to a vibrant exchange over the next two days, and we
hope that you will emerge from this conference re-energized and filled with creative
ideas and practical solutions. Please let us know if there is anything that we can do to
enrich your time at Duke.
Conference Planning Committee
Ana Apostoleris
Duke Law School ’16
Ernest Britt III
Duke University, Trinity ’16
Sr. Associate Dean Guy Charles
Duke Law School
Professor Trina Jones
Duke Law School
Christine Kim
Stephanie Lowd
Duke Law School
Faculty Events Coordinator
Alexandria Miller
Duke University, Trinity ’17
Professor Angela Onwuachi-Willig
University of Iowa College of Law
Seth Pearson
Liz Wan’gu

Duke Law Die In
December 10, 2014
More than 60 members of the Duke Law community held a “die-in” in Star Commons on Dec.
10 to peaceably protest the death of New York resident Eric Garner and other unarmed black
and minority individuals killed by police officers in recent years. Holding signs bearing the
names of men and women killed, participants, including students, faculty, and staff, laid on the
floor in silence for 11 minutes — one minute for each time Garner told police he couldn’t
breathe as they continued to forcibly restrain him.

The Honorable Damon J. Keith
Judge Keith, a Detroit native, was appointed in 1967 to
the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of
Michigan by President Lyndon B. Johnson, becoming
the first African-American chief judge of that court in
1975. Two years later, President Jimmy Carter appointed
Judge Keith to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth
Circuit.
In 1985, Chief Justice Warren E. Burger appointed Judge
Keith as Chairman of the Bicentennial of the Constitution Committee for the Sixth
Circuit. Then in 1987, Judge Keith was appointed by Chief Justice William Rehnquist
to serve as the National Chairman of the Judicial Conference Committee on the
Bicentennial of the Constitution. Bill of Rights plaques bearing his name are in federal
courthouses and government buildings across the United States and in Guam,
including the Thurgood Marshall Federal Judiciary Building and the J. Edgar Hoover
Building, headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Judge Keith assumed senior status in 1995 and continues to serve the Court today.
He currently holds the distinction of being the longest serving judge in the history of
the Sixth Circuit. Judge Keith earned a J.D. from Howard University School of Law,
and an L.L.M. from Wayne State University Law School. He has received more than
40 honorary degrees, including one from Harvard University. Judge Keith is the
recipient of countless awards and distinctions, including the Spingarn Medal from the
NAACP (the Association’s highest honor) and the Edward J. Devitt Distinguished
Service to Justice Award, the highest award that can be bestowed on a member of the
federal judiciary.

Kimberlé W. Crenshaw
Kimberlé Crenshaw, Professor of Law at UCLA and
Columbia Law Schools, is a leading authority in the area
of civil rights; Black feminist legal theory; and race,
racism and the law. Her articles have appeared in the
Harvard Law Review, National Black Law Journal,
Stanford Law Review, and Southern California Law
Review. She is the founding coordinator of the Critical
Race Theory Workshop, and the co-editor of the volume,
Critical Race Theory: Key Documents That Shaped the
Movement. Professor Crenshaw has lectured widely on race matters, addressing
audiences across the country as well as in Europe, India, Africa and South America.
Professor Crenshaw has worked extensively on a variety of issues pertaining to gender
and race in the domestic arena including violence against women, structural racial
inequality, and affirmative action. A specialist on race and gender equality, she has
facilitated workshops for human rights activists in Brazil and in India, and for
constitutional court judges in South Africa. Her groundbreaking work on
“Intersectionality” has traveled globally and was influential in the drafting of the
equality clause in the South African Constitution.
Professor Crenshaw is the co-founder and Executive Director of the African
American Policy Forum, a gender and racial justice legal think tank, and the founder
and Executive Director of the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies at
Columbia Law School. She is a leading voice in calling for a gender-inclusive approach
to racial justice interventions, having spearheaded the Why We Can’t Wait Campaign
and co-authored Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced and Underprotected, and Say
Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women.

Leisy J. Abrego is an Associate Professor in Chicana/o Studies at UCLA. Trained in
sociology, she studies families, Central American migration, and the production of “illegality”
through U.S. immigration laws. Her book, Sacrificing Families: Navigating Laws, Labor, and Love Across
Borders (Stanford University Press), examines the well-being of Salvadoran immigrants and their
families—both in the United States and in El Salvador—as these are shaped by immigration policies
and gendered expectations. She also conducts research on the day-to-day lives of mixed-status
families after DACA. Her scholarship analyzing legal consciousness, illegality, and legal violence has
garnered numerous national awards. She is also a committed scholar-activist, writing pro-bono
expert declarations in asylum cases and dedicating much of her time to supporting and advocating
for refugees and immigrants in various ways.
Daryl V. Atkinson is a Senior Staff Attorney at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice
(SCSJ) where he focuses on drug policy and criminal justice reform issues, particularly removing the
legal barriers triggered by contact with the criminal justice system. Prior to joining SCSJ, Daryl was a
staff attorney at the North Carolina Office of Indigent Defense Services (IDS) where he coordinated
the Systems Evaluation Project (SEP), which pioneered a first-of-its kind evaluation tool for
indigent defense systems. While at IDS, Daryl went on to help develop the Collateral Consequence
Assessment Tool (C-CAT), an online searchable database that allows the user to identify the
collateral consequences triggered by North Carolina convictions. C-CAT served as a model for the
American Bar Association’s National Inventory of Collateral Consequences of Conviction.
Mr. Atkinson is a founding member of the North Carolina Second Chance Alliance, a burgeoning
statewide coalition of advocacy organizations, service providers, and directly impacted people that
seeks to achieve the safe and successful reintegration of adults and juveniles returning home from
incarceration. In 2014, Daryl was recognized by the White House as a “Reentry and Employment
Champion of Change” for his extraordinary work to facilitate employment opportunities for people
with criminal records. In July 2015, Daryl was selected by the U.S. Department of Justice as the
first-ever Second Chance Fellow.
Mario L. Barnes is Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development and a Professor
of Law and Criminology, Law & Society (by courtesy), at the University of California, Irvine (UCI).
He co-directs the UCI Center on Law, Equality and Race, and researches and teaches in the criminal
justice and constitutional law areas. His recent work appears in journals at Fordham, UCLA, Indiana
and Georgetown. From 2004 to 2009, he taught law at the University of Miami. He received his
B.A. and J.D. from U.C. Berkeley, and a Master of Laws from the University of Wisconsin. Prior to
entering academia, he spent twelve years on active duty in the U.S. Navy, including service as a
prosecutor, defense counsel, and Special Assistant U.S. Attorney. He is a recipient of the AALS
Minority Groups Section’s Derrick Bell Award (2008) and Clyde Ferguson Award (2015), for a
junior and senior scholar, respectively, who excels in teaching, scholarship and service.
Ari Berman is a senior contributing writer for The Nation magazine and an Investigative
Journalism Fellow at The Nation Institute. His new book, Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for
Voting Rights in America, was published in August 2015 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He has written
extensively about American politics, civil rights, and the intersection of money and politics. His
stories have also appeared in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and The Guardian, and he is a frequent
guest and commentator on MSNBC and NPR. His first book, Herding Donkeys: The Fight to Rebuild the
Democratic Party and Reshape American Politics, was published in 2010 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Bernadette Brown is the Director of the Center for Sexual and Gender Diversity at Duke
University. Her intellectual pursuits mainly involve uncovering scholarship pertaining to, and
cultivating relationships with people who desire to implement, equitable systems and policies that
incorporate an intersectional lens with respect to race and ethnicity, religion, political ideology,
sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression.
Prior to joining Duke in 2015, her professional experience included serving as a senior program
specialist at the National Council on Crime and Delinquency where she managed a program on
LGBTQI youth in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems in California; serving as faculty for
The National Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) Resource Center, where she developed and
delivered the LGBTI portion of the PREA training for those seeking to become certified PREA
auditors by the U.S. Department of Justice; and serving as a policy director for Michigan’s statewide
LGBT equal rights organization. Bernadette began her career as a public defender in New York City.
In 2009, she was selected as a fellow for the inaugural cohort of the Pipeline Project’s 21st Century
Fellows Program, a national program designed to promote and support LGBT leaders of color.
Devon Carbado is the Honorable Harry Pregerson Professor of Law at UCLA School of
Law. He has won numerous teaching awards, including being elected Professor of the Year by the
UCLA School of Law classes of 2000 and 2006. He also received the Law School's Rutter Award
for Excellence in Teaching in 2003 and the University's Distinguished Teaching Award, the Eby
Award for the Art of Teaching, in 2007. Professor Carbado is the author of Acting White? Rethinking
Race in “Post-Racial” America (Oxford University Press) (with Mitu Gulati) and the editor of several
volumes, including Race Law Stories (Foundation Press) (with Rachel Moran). Professor Carbado was
the Shikes Fellow in Civil Liberties and Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School in 2012.
He served as Vice Dean for Faculty and Research at the UCLA School of Law from 2006-07, and
again in 2009-10.
Jennifer M. Chacón is a Professor in the School of Law at the University of California,
Irvine, where she is also the former Senior Associate Dean of Academic Affairs. She is currently a
Visiting Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and was a Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard
Law School from 2014-2015. Before teaching at U.C. Irvine, she was a Professor of Law at the U.C.
Davis School of Law. She is the author of numerous law review articles, book chapters, expert
commentaries and shorter articles and essays discussing immigration, criminal law, constitutional law
and citizenship issues. Professor Chacόn was an associate with the New York law firm of Davis Polk
and Wardwell from 1999-2003. She clerked for the Honorable Sidney R. Thomas of the Ninth
Circuit from 1998-1999. She holds a J.D. from Yale Law School (1998) and an A.B. in International
Relations from Stanford University (1994).
Richard Delgado is one of the leading commentators on race in the United States. He has
appeared on Good Morning America, the MacNeil-Lehrer Report, PBS, NPR, the Fred Friendly
Show, and Canadian NPR. The author of numerous articles and books, his work has been praised or
reviewed in The Nation, The New Republic, the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal.
His books have won eight national book prizes, including six Gustavus Myers awards for
outstanding book on human rights in North America, the American Library Association’s
Outstanding Academic Book, and a Pulitzer Prize nomination. Delgado lives with his wife, legal
writer Jean Stefancic, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama where he holds the title of Professor and John J.
Sparkman Chair of Law at the University of Alabama School of Law.

Walter E. Dellinger III is a member of the Appellate Practice at O’Melveny & Myers. He
is on leave from his professorship at Duke University where he is the Douglas B. Maggs Emeritus
Professor of Law. In 2013 he was named one of the 100 Most Influential Lawyers in America by the
National Law Journal and recognized with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American
Lawyer. Dellinger served in the White House under President Clinton and in the US Department of
Justice as Assistant Attorney General and head of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) from 1993 to
1996. He was acting Solicitor General for the 1996-97 Term of the US Supreme Court. He has
testified more than 25 times before committees of Congress. He has served as Special Counsel to
the Board of Directors of the New York Stock Exchange.
In 2001, Dellinger successfully argued in the U.S. Supreme Court in defense of the two North
Carolina congressional districts that elected the first African-American members of Congress from
that state since the Civil War. In 2003, Dellinger was counsel of record for the Human Rights
Campaign and other national LGBT organizations in filing an amicus brief in Lawrence v. Texas in
which the Supreme Court held that laws criminalizing homosexual sex were unconstitutional. In
2013, he filed a brief in the U.S. Supreme Court’s California gay marriage case, Hollingsworth v. Perry,
successfully arguing that opponents of gay marriage had no standing to challenge the lower court gay
marriage victory in California. He has served as a constitutional advisor to national women’s groups
and successfully argued in Jackson v. City of Birmingham that school employees fired for complaining
about gender discrimination have a right to sue for retaliation under Title IX.
Chinyere Ezie is a Staff Attorney at the Southern Poverty Law Center (“SPLC”) LGBT Rights
Project, where she is lead counsel for Ashley Diamond, and where her advocacy work focuses
on transgender and intersex persons living in the South. Prior to joining SPLC, Chinyere clerked on
the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and worked as an associate at Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen,
and Hamilton LLP. Chinyere is a William J. Fulbright Scholar and a graduate of Yale University and
Columbia Law School, where she served as Editor in Chief of the Columbia Journal of Gender and
Law.
Tanisha C. Ford, Ph.D. is an award-winning writer, historian, public speaker, and professor
at the University of Massachusetts - Amherst. She blends her love of fashion and performance and
her commitment to social justice to create her own innovative approach to studying the social
movements of the 20th and 21st centuries. The result is her brand of “Haute Couture
Intellectualism.” Like the renowned couturiers who spend months (even years) skillfully hand
stitching elaborate gowns, Dr. Ford consciously crafts her research and teaching with a sense of
social responsibility and intellectual panache.
She is invested in research and grassroots initiatives that bring the often marginalized voices of
young women of color around the world to the forefront. Her first book, Liberated Threads: Black
Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul (UNC Press, Fall 2015), uncovers how and why black
women use beauty culture and fashion as a form of resistance and cultural-political expression.

James Forman Jr. is a Clinical Professor of Law at Yale Law School where he teaches
Constitutional Law, a seminar on Race and the Criminal Justice System, and the Educational
Opportunity and Juvenile Justice Clinic. In the clinic, Professor Forman and his students represent
young people facing expulsion from school for discipline violations, and they work to keep their
clients in school and on track towards graduation. In 1997, along with David Domenici, Professor
Forman started the Maya Angelou Public Charter School, an alternative school for school dropouts
and youth who had previously been arrested. A decade later, in 2007, the Maya Angelou School
expanded and agreed to run the school inside D.C.’s juvenile prison. The prison school, which had
long been an abysmal failure, has been transformed under the leadership of the Maya Angelou staff;
the court monitor overseeing D.C.’s juvenile system called the turnaround “extraordinary.”
Professor Forman is a graduate of Atlanta’s Roosevelt High School, Brown University, and Yale
Law School, and was a law clerk for Judge William Norris of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the
Ninth Circuit and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor of the United States Supreme Court. After clerking,
he joined the Public Defender Service in Washington, D.C., where for six years he represented both
juveniles and adults charged with crimes.
Luis Ricardo Fraga is the Arthur Foundation Endowed Professor of Transformative Latino
Leadership and Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. Prior to his Fall
2014 appointment at Notre Dame, Fraga was Associate Vice Provost for Faculty Advancement,
Russell F. Stark University Professor, Director of the Diversity Research Institute, and Professor of
Political Science at the University of Washington. He has been on the faculty at Stanford University,
the University of Notre Dame, and the University of Oklahoma. Fraga has numerous books and
other scholarly publications in the area of American politics, where he specializes in the politics of
race and ethnicity, Latino politics, immigration policy, education politics, voting rights policy, and
urban politics. He is a past Vice-President of the American Political Science Association (APSA) and
one of six principal investigators on the Latino National Survey (LNS), the first-ever state-stratified
survey of Latinos in the U.S.
Fraga received a number of distinguished teaching, advising, mentoring, and service awards at
Stanford and at the University of Washington. He has also committed much time and energy to
service outside of academia. In 2011, President Barack Obama appointed Fraga to the President’s
Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for Hispanics, which develops action plans and
priorities for President Obama and the Secretary of Education to improve the educational
attainment of Hispanics. He is the immediate past president of the Board of Directors of
OneAmerica, an immigrant rights and advocacy organization based in Seattle, WA. He was
recognized as one of the Champions of Catholic Education in 2012 for his work to establish the first
Spanish-English, two-way immersion school in the Seattle Archdiocese, the Juan Diego Academy at
Holy Rosary School in Tacoma, WA.

Alejandra Gomez was born in Pomona, California to immigrant parents. She became aware
of the broken immigration system in the United States at a young age following the passage of
Proposition 187. Proposition 187 was an anti-immigration law that targeted undocumented
immigrants living in California in the mid-1990s. Ms. Gomez’s father at the time was undocumented
and Proposition 187 forced Ms. Gomez’s family to move to Arizona in hopes of escaping the
dangers of Proposition 187 and other anti-immigrant sentiment.
Ms. Gomez began her career in community organizing in 2007, during the beginning of Sherriff Joe
Arpaio’s criminal suppression sweeps that were racially charged and targeted immigrant
communities. Seeing the fear and harassment her community was experiencing and the reminder of
her own childhood, Ms. Gomez began working with Maricopa Citizens for Safety and
Accountability to organize against Sherriff Arpaio and his unfair practices.
Since her start in organizing, Ms. Gomez has focused her work on immigration rights through large-
scale civic engagement efforts to bring out the Latino vote and direct action. Ms. Gomez lives in
Phoenix, AZ and holds a B.A. in Political Science from Arizona State University. She has dedicated
her life to social justice and community empowerment through grassroots mobilization.
Cheryl I. Harris is the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation Chair in Civil Rights and
Civil Liberties at UCLA School of Law. She teaches Constitutional Law, Civil Rights, Employment
Discrimination, Critical Race Theory and Race Conscious Remedies. One of the founding faculty of
the Critical Race Studies Program at the Law School, and currently its faculty co-director, she has
been recognized as a leader in the area of civil rights education and was the recipient of the ACLU
Foundation of Southern California's Distinguished Professor Award for Civil Rights Education.
Professor Harris is also currently Interim Chair of the Department of African-American Studies at
UCLA.
A graduate of Wellesley College and Northwestern School of Law, Professor Harris began her career
with a leading criminal defense firm in Chicago and later served as a senior legal advisor in the City
Attorney’s office during the reform administration of Mayor Harold Washington.
Professor Harris is the author of groundbreaking scholarship in the field of Critical Race Theory,
including the influential article, Whiteness as Property (Harvard Law Review). Harris’ work considers
how race shapes material and symbolic systems and has particularly been considered with issues of
education and access. She has lectured widely at universities and conferences in the U.S. and in
Europe, South Africa and Australia and has been an influential voice on race, inequality and anti-
discrimination law, publishing op-eds in leading outlets and providing commentary to a number of
media outlets and public fora. She has also studied race and equality from a global perspective since
her work in the 1990s as part of the leadership of the National Conference of Black Lawyers with
South African lawyers during the development of South Africa’s first democratic constitution.

Kerry Haynie is a faculty member in Duke’s Political Science and African and African
American Studies departments. He is the Director of the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity,
and Gender in the Social Sciences, and the Co-Director of the Duke Council on Race and Ethnicity
(DCORE). Professor Haynie received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill, and is a specialist on race, ethnicity and gender in politics. Along with articles in several
scholarly journals, his publications include New Race Politics: Understanding Minority and Immigrant
Voting (co-edited), African American Legislators in the American States, and The Encyclopedia of Minorities in
American Politics, volumes I and II (Oryx Press). Professor Haynie’s current research projects are
grouped under two headings: Understanding the Transformed and Transforming South: Perspectives on Race,
Culture, Politics, and Society; and Revisiting Ralph Bunche: Race, Politics, and Policy in South Africa and the
American South.
Marielena Hincapié is the Executive Director of the National Immigration Law Center, the
main organization dedicated to defending and advancing the rights of low-income immigrants in the
U.S. Under her executive leadership, NILC has grown to be one of the premier immigrants’ rights
organizations, strategically using a combination of litigation, policy, communications, and alliance-
building strategies to effect social change. Ms. Hincapié is highly respected for her legal and political
strategies and is seen as a bridge builder within the immigrants’ rights field as well as across broader
social justice sectors. In 2013, she received Univision’s Corazón Award in honor of her commitment
to the Latino community.
Before joining NILC, Ms. Hincapié worked for the Legal Aid Society of San Francisco’s
Employment Law Center, where she founded the Center’s Immigrant Workers’ Rights Project. She
holds a juris doctor degree from Northeastern University School of Law, served on the American
Bar Association’s Commission on Immigration, and is currently a member of the Jobs with Justice
and Welcome.us boards of directors. Fully bilingual and bicultural, Ms. Hincapié immigrated as a
child from Medellín, Colombia, to Central Falls, Rhode Island and is the youngest of 10 children.
Karla FC Holloway, Ph.D., M.L.S., is James B. Duke Professor of English and Professor of
Law at Duke University. She holds a secondary faculty appointment in African and African-
American Studies. Her research and teaching focus on African American cultural studies, biocultural
studies, ethics, and law. Her national and institutional board memberships include the Greenwall
Foundation’s Advisory Board in Bioethics (Emeritus), the Hastings Center, and the Princeton
University Council on Women and Gender. Professor Holloway is the author of over forty essays
and eight books including Private Bodies, Public Texts: Race, Gender, and a Cultural Bioethics (2011) and
Legal Fictions: Constituting Race and Composing Literature (2014). She is the recipient of national awards
and foundation fellowships including the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Residency Fellowship
and the Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellowship at Harvard’s Du Bois Institute. Word has it that
she is also working on a novel, but there has been no independent confirmation of this speculation.

Pamela S. Karlan is a productive scholar and an award-winning teacher. She is co-director of
Stanford Law School’s Supreme Court Litigation Clinic, where students litigate live cases before the
Court. One of the nation’s leading experts on voting and the political process, she has served as a
commissioner on the California Fair Political Practices Commission, an assistant counsel and
cooperating attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and a Deputy Assistant
Attorney General in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice (where she received
the Attorney General’s Award for Exceptional Service – the department’s highest award
for employee performance – as part of the team responsible for implementing the Supreme
Court’s decision in United States v. Windsor). Professor Karlan is the co-author of leading casebooks
on constitutional law, constitutional litigation, and the law of democracy, as well as numerous
scholarly articles. Before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 1998, she was a professor of law
at the University of Virginia School of Law and served as a law clerk to Justice Harry A. Blackmun
of the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge Abraham D. Sofaer of the U.S. District Court for the
Southern District of New York. Karlan is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,
the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers, and the American Law Institute.
Holning Lau is a Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina School of Law. Prior
to joining the UNC faculty, Professor Lau was an Associate Professor of Law at Hofstra University.
Before that, he was a fellow at UCLA’s Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation and Gender
Identity Law and Public Policy. Professor Lau received his J.D. from the University of Chicago and
his B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. He is the immediate past president of the ACLU of
North Carolina.
Taeku Lee is a Professor of Political Science and Law at the University of California,
Berkeley. His books include Mobilizing Public Opinion (2002); Transforming Politics, Transforming
America (2006), Why Americans Don't Join the Party (2011), Accountability through Public Opinion (2011),
and Asian American Political Participation (2011). Lee is also Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the
Brookings Institution, Managing Director of Asian American Decisions, and serves as Treasurer of
the American Political Science Association and on the Board of Overseers of the American National
Election Studies and the General Social Survey. Prior to Berkeley, Lee was Assistant Professor of
Public Policy at Harvard and Robert Wood Johnson Scholar at Yale. Lee was born in South Korea,
grew up in rural Malaysia, Manhattan, and suburban Detroit, and is a proud graduate of K-12 public
schools, the University of Michigan (A.B.), Harvard University (M.P.P.), and the University of
Chicago (Ph.D.).
Kevin R. Johnson is Dean, Mabie-Apallas Professor of Public Interest Law, and Professor of
Chicana/o Studies at the University California, Davis, School of Law. Dean Johnson has published
extensively on immigration law and civil rights. His book, Immigration Law and the US-Mexico Border
(2011), received the Latino Literacy Now’s International Latino Book Awards – Best Reference
Book. A graduate of Harvard Law School, Dean Johnson earned an A.B. in economics from UC
Berkeley, graduating Phi Beta Kappa. He has served on the board of directors of Legal Services of
Northern California since 1996 and currently is President of the board. From 2006-11, he served on
the board of directors of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund. Dean Johnson
is the recipient of many awards and honors, including the Association of American Law Schools
Minority Groups Section Clyde Ferguson Award (2004).

Robin A. Lenhardt is a Professor of Law at the Fordham Law School. Her work on matters
pertaining to race, family, and citizenship has appeared in numerous books and journals, including
the California Law Review, the Hastings Law Journal, the New York University Law Review, and
the UCLA Law Review. In addition to Fordham, Professor Lenhardt has held teaching positions at
Columbia Law School, the Georgetown University Law Center, and the University of Chicago Law
School. Before entering legal academia, Professor Lenhardt held a number of positions in the
private and non-profit sectors. A law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer and
Judge Hugh Bownes of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, Professor Lenhardt was
formerly a Counsel in the Washington, D.C. office of Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering, where she was a
member of the litigation team that defended the University of Michigan in the Grutter v. Bollinger and
Gratz v. Bollinger affirmative action lawsuits. Professor Lenhardt also received a Skadden Foundation
Fellowship to work as a staff attorney for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, served as an
attorney advisor in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, and was a member of
President Obama’s DOJ Transition Team. Professor Lenhardt holds an A.B. degree in English from
Brown University; a J.D. from Harvard Law School; an M.P.A. from Harvard University’s John F.
Kennedy School of Government; and an L.L.M. from the Georgetown University Law Center.
Rachel F. Moran is Dean Emerita and Michael J. Connell Distinguished Professor of Law at
UCLA. Before that, she was the Robert D. and Leslie-Kay Raven Professor of Law at UC Berkeley
and received that campus’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 1995. She was a founding faculty
member at the UC Irvine Law School.
Professor Moran was appointed President of the Association of American Law Schools in 2009. In
September 2011, President Obama selected Moran to serve as a member of the Permanent
Committee for the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise. In May 2014, American Bar Association
President James R. Silkenat chose her for the ABA Task Force on the Financing of Legal Education.
In August 2015, she became the inaugural William H. Neukom Fellows Research Chair in Diversity
and Law. In that capacity, she is co-directing a national research initiative on The Future of Latinos
in the United States with Robert L. Nelson.
Moran’s numerous publications include: Educational Policy and the Law (with Mark G. Yudof, Betsy
Levin, James E. Ryan and Kristi L. Bowman) (5th ed. Cengage 2012); Race Law Stories (with Devon
Carbado, Foundation Press, 2008); and Interracial Intimacy: The Regulation of Race and Romance
(University of Chicago Press, 2001).
Hiroshi Motomura is the Susan Westerberg Prager Professor of Law at UCLA, and
formerly Kenan Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
His book, Americans in Waiting (2006) received the Association of American Publishers PROSE
Award as the year’s best book in Law and Legal Studies, and his new book, Immigration Outside the
Law (2014), won the same award in 2015. He is also the co-author of two casebooks: Immigration and
Citizenship: Process and Policy (7th ed. 2012) and Forced Migration: Law and Policy (2d ed. 2013). Hiroshi
received the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award in 2014, and he is one of 26 law professors
nationwide profiled in What the Best Law Teachers Do (2013).

Mark Anthony Neal is Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African
and African American Studies at Duke University, where he won the 2010 Robert B. Cox Award for
Teaching. He holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from the State University of New York at Buffalo.
His scholarly work in the fields of African-American, Cultural, and Gender Studies draws heavily
upon literary theory, urban sociology, social history, postmodern philosophy, Queer theory and
most notably popular culture. He is the author of several critically-acclaimed books, including
LOOKING FOR LEROY: ILLEGIBLE BLACK MASCULINITIES (2013); NEW BLACK MAN (2006); SONGS
IN THE KEY OF BLACK LIFE: A RHYTHM AND BLUES NATION (2003); SOUL BABIES: BLACK POPULAR
CULTURE AND THE POST-SOUL AESTHETIC (2002); WHAT THE MUSIC SAID: BLACK POPULAR MUSIC
AND BLACK PUBLIC CULTURE (1999). A frequent commentator and columnist on black popular
culture, Professor Neal is also host of the weekly webcast “Left of Black.”
Angela Onwuachi-Willig is the Charles and Marion Kierscht Professor at the University
of Iowa College of Law. She graduated from Grinnell College, Phi Beta Kappa, and received her J.D.
from the University of Michigan, where she was a Clarence Darrow Scholar, a Michigan Law Review
Note Editor, and an Associate Editor of the Michigan Journal of Race and Law. She clerked for U.S.
District Judge Solomon Oliver and U.S. Circuit Judge Karen Nelson Moore. She is currently
working toward her Ph.D. in Sociology and African American Studies from Yale University. She has
been a visiting professor at Yale Law School and the University of Michigan Law School. She is
author of According to Our Hearts: Rhinelander v. Rhinelander and the Law of the Multiracial Family (Yale
2013). Her articles have appeared in the Yale Law Journal, California Law Review, Michigan Law Review,
Georgetown Law Journal, Texas Law Review, UCLA Law Review, and Vanderbilt Law Review, to name a
few. She received the 2015 AALS Minority Groups Section Clyde Ferguson Award. She is an elected
ALI member, a past recipient of the Derrick Bell Award, and a former Iowa Supreme Court finalist.
Russell Robinson is the Distinguished Haas Chair in LGBT Equity Professor of Law at
Berkeley Law. During the 2014-15 school year, Professor Robinson was the Samuel Rubin Visiting
Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and a Fellow at the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law.
Prior to joining UC Berkeley, Robinson was Professor of Law at UCLA. Robinson graduated with
honors from Harvard Law School (1998), after receiving his B.A. summa cum laude from Hampton
University (1995). Robinson clerked for Judge Dorothy Nelson of the Ninth Circuit Court of
Appeals (1998-99) and for Justice Stephen Breyer of the U.S. Supreme Court (2000-01). He has also
worked for the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Legal Counsel (1999-2000) and the firm of
Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer and Feld in Los Angeles, practicing entertainment law (2001-02).
Thena Robinson-Mock serves as Project Director of Advancement Project’s Ending the
Schoolhouse to Jailhouse Track Campaign. She is a civil rights attorney with over a decade of
experience in racial and social justice advocacy. Prior to joining Advancement Project, Ms.
Robinson-Mock served as Executive Director of Kids Rethink New Orleans Schools (The
Rethinkers), a dynamic youth leadership organization dedicated to creating intentional spaces for
young people to “rethink” the public school experience and advocate for educational equity in New
Orleans. Ms. Robinson-Mock worked as a staff attorney for the New Orleans office of the Southern
Poverty Law Center (SPLC) where she provided direct representation for youth in juvenile court and
school discipline proceedings and handled civil rights litigation. Her legal background also includes
civil rights fair housing law and capital post-conviction representation. Ms. Robinson-Mock also has
a passion for merging the arts with social justice and is an ensemble member of Junebug
Productions, formerly known as the Free Southern Theater, which served as a cultural organizing
arm of the Civil Rights Movement.

Cristina Rodríguez is Leighton Homer Surbeck Professor of Law at Yale Law School. Her
research interests include constitutional law and theory; immigration law and policy; administrative
law and process; and citizenship theory. In recent years, she has used immigration law and related
areas as vehicles through which to explore how federalism and the separation of powers shape the
management and resolution of legal and political conflict. From 2004-2012, Rodriguez was on the
faculty at NYU School of Law, and she has been a Visiting Professor at Harvard and Stanford Law
Schools. From 2011-2013, she served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal
Counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice. She earned her B.A. and J.D. from Yale and attended
Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, where she received a Master of Letters in Modern History.
Following law school, Rodríguez clerked for Judge David S. Tatel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for
the D.C. Circuit and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.
Juan & Gee Session-Smalls. Multi-media personalities Juan & Gee Session-Smalls can
be seen doling out Love, Life & Relationship advice on their blog, LoveWorks, traveling the country
sharing their unique perspectives at various conferences and events, or entertaining audiences via
their newest platform, Juan & Gee Live!, a talk show-style event that aims to enlighten, enrich and
entertain.
The award-winning couple are co-founders of The Gentlemen’s Foundation, Inc. (TGF), a non-
profit organization dedicated to the empowerment and healthy development of LGBTQ men of
color. TGF seeks to eradicate the 'gay stigma' perpetuated by societal norms, and to decrease the
prevalence of depression and suicide among Black and other minority LGBTQ youth. In an effort
to tackle these seemingly daunting tasks, the Foundation operates mPact2, a holistic empowerment
mentoring program for young gentlemen between the ages of 18-25. TGF also offers support,
primarily in the form of increased public awareness and grants, to other charitable and non-profit
organizations that share the same mission or whose programs have similar goals, interests, and
objectives. TGF’s mantra is simple: #BETHECHANGE. Juan & Gee have been married almost as
long as they’ve known each other. The two reside in Atlanta with their son, Lil Gee.
Theodore M. Shaw is the Julius L. Chambers Distinguished Professor of Law and Director
of the Center for Civil Rights at the University of North Carolina School of Law at Chapel Hill.
Professor Shaw teaches Civil Procedure and Advanced Constitutional Law/Fourteenth Amendment.
He has also been a faculty member at the University of Michigan Law School and at Columbia
University Law School. While at Michigan, he played a key role in initiating a review of the law
school’s admissions practices and policies, and served on the faculty committee that promulgated
the admissions program that was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003 in Grutter v. Bollinger.
Professor Shaw was the fifth Director-Counsel and President of the NAACP Legal Defense and
Educational Fund, Inc., for which he worked in various capacities over the span of twenty-six years.
He has litigated education, employment, voting rights, housing, police misconduct, capital
punishment and other civil rights cases in trial and appellate courts, and in the United States
Supreme Court. His human rights work has taken him to Africa, Asia, Europe, and South America.
Mr. Shaw also served on the Obama Transition Team after the 2008 presidential election, as team
leader for the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department.

Neil S. Siegel is the David W. Ichel Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science at
Duke Law School, where he also serves as co-director of the Program in Public Law and director of
the DC Summer Institute on Law and Policy. His research and teaching fall in the fields of
constitutional law and federal courts. His scholarship addresses a variety of areas of constitutional
law and, in doing so, considers ways in which a methodologically pluralist approach can
accommodate societal changes while remaining disciplined and bound by the rule of law. For
example, his Fourteenth Amendment work examines competing mediating principles of equality and
identifies ways in which equality values are protected under both equal protection and substantive
due process. His writings on constitutional politics and judicial statesmanship seek to understand
how participants in the practice of constitutional law can vindicate the conditions for the legitimacy
of constitutional law.
Holiday Simmons is the Director of Community Education and Advocacy in the Southern
Regional Office of Lambda Legal, the oldest and largest national legal organization committed to
achieving full recognition of the civil rights of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transgender people and
people with HIV. With a background in social work, education and performing arts and activism,
Simmons has worked with youth in foster care, taught GED, managed education initiatives, and
facilitated numerous creative writing and spoken word workshops with groups of youth, LGBT
people, women, and Africana and Latino communities both in the United States and abroad.
Before coming to Lambda Legal, Simmons was the psychiatric social worker at Grady Memorial
Hospital in Atlanta, where he led a program for homeless people with mental illnesses. Before
relocating to Atlanta, Simmons served as community initiatives manager for the Gay, Lesbian and
Straight Education Network (GLSEN) in New York, where he gave national support and training to
community members on safer schools for LGBTQ and ally students. While at GLSEN, he
organized Summer Start, a week-long student training event. He also managed their national days of
action including his creation, TransAction, the first national in-school student-led action focusing on
gender and the larger transgender umbrella.
Jean Stefancic is Professor & Clement Research Affiliate at the University of Alabama School
of Law, where she teaches and writes about civil rights, law reform, social change, and the legal
profession. She has written and co-authored numerous articles and books, many with her husband
Richard Delgado, with whom she shared writing residencies at Bellagio, Bogliasco, and Centrum.
Their book, Critical White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror, won a Gustavus Myers award for
outstanding book on human rights in North America. Stefancic and Delgado served as co-editors
for the long-running Critical America series (NYU Press). Her book, How Lawyers Lose Their Way,
examines how law practice can stifle creativity.

Madhavi Sunder is the Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Martin Luther King,
Jr. Professor of Law at the U.C. Davis School of Law. Professor Sunder is a leading scholar of law
and culture. She was named a Carnegie Scholar in 2006 and has been a Visiting Professor of Law at
the Yale Law School, the University of Chicago Law School, and Cornell Law School. Her work
traverses numerous legal fields, from intellectual property to human rights law and the First
Amendment. Professor Sunder has published articles in the Yale Law Journal, the Stanford Law Review,
the California Law Review, the Texas Law Review, and Law and Contemporary Problems, among others.
Her book, From Goods to a Good Life: Intellectual Property and Global Justice, was published by
Yale University Press in 2012. She was named a Carnegie Scholar in 2006 and has been a Visiting
Professor of Law at the Yale Law School, the University of Chicago Law School, and Cornell Law
School. Her work traverses numerous legal fields, from intellectual property to human rights law and
the First Amendment. Professor Sunder has published articles in the Yale Law Journal, the Stanford
Law Review, the California Law Review, the Texas Law Review, and Law and Contemporary Problems, among
others. Her book, From Goods to a Good Life: Intellectual Property and Global Justice, was published by
Yale University Press in 2012.
Goldie Taylor is veteran journalist, opinion writer and cable news contributor. A former
columnist and contributor for MSNBC, CNN and HLN, Taylor was also a political and business
writer at the Atlanta Journal Constitution and has been a working journalist and political strategist for
nearly 30 years. She has been an executive consultant, focused on diverse programming and
audience development, at NBC Universal and CNN Worldwide. Taylor is currently Editor-At-Large
at The Daily Beast.
As a political consultant, she has served in various key leadership positions, including
communications and political director, for local, district and statewide candidates. She most recently
served as communications director and deputy campaign manager for Atlanta mayor Kasim Reed.
Taylor has been featured on every major broadcast and cable news network, on programs such as
Real Time with Bill Maher, Dr. Phil, The Steve Harvey Show, and Good Morning America. She is a
frequent guest on a full host of local and national radio shows, including NPR, and is regularly
featured in print and digital publications— including, most recently, an Ebony Magazine cover story
detailing the legacy of The Cosby Show.
Taylor is the author of In My Father’s House (Wheatmark Press, 2005) and The January Girl (Warner
Books, 2007/ Hachette Grand Central 2008). She is currently working on her third novel, Paper
Gods, and her first non-fiction title, The Devil and Missouri Daniel. She is producing her first feature
length documentary— #89Blocks. Taylor lives in New York

Jacqueline Berrien
(1961-2015)
We are deeply saddened by the death of Jacqueline Berrien,
a champion for civil rights.
By SAM ROBERTS NOV. 11, 2015
Jacqueline Berrien, a civil rights lawyer who was
President Obama’s chairwoman of the Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission, died on
Monday in Baltimore. She was 53.
The cause was cancer, her friend Melanie
Eversley said. Ms. Berrien became ill in August
during the N.A.A.C.P.’s Journey for Justice
march from Selma, Ala., to Washington.
“Her last act was doing what she loved: civil
rights,” said her husband, Peter M. Williams, the
executive vice president for programs for the
National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People.
The E.E.O.C. had a number of successes during
Ms. Berrien’s tenure as its chairwoman, from
April 2010 through August 2014: It promulgated
rules against discrimination in employment and
health-insurance enrollment on the basis of
disability or genetic test results; it won a record
$240 million jury verdict (reduced to $1.6
million because of a statutory cap on damages)
against a company accused of abusing workers
with intellectual disabilities at an Iowa turkey
processing plant; and it significantly reduced its
case backlog.
Her death prompted accolades from former
colleagues, including the president and Michelle
Obama, who praised her “leadership and passion
for ensuring everyone gets a fair chance to
succeed in the workplace.”
Jacqueline Ann Berrien was born in Washington
on Nov. 28, 1961. Her father, Clifford, was a
pharmacist. Her mother, the former Anna Belle
Smith, was a nurse.
Ms. Berrien graduated from Oberlin College and
from Harvard Law School, where she was general
editor of The Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties
Law Review. After serving as a clerk for a federal
judge, she joined the Lawyers’ Committee for
Civil Rights and the Women’s Rights Project of
the American Civil Liberties Union.
In 1994, she became an assistant counsel to the
NAACP Legal Defense Fund, focusing on voting
rights and school desegregation litigation. After
working at the Ford Foundation, she returned as
associate director-counsel of the fund, whose
national headquarters is in New York.
She taught at Harvard Law School and New York
Law School and lived most recently in
Washington. In addition to her husband, she is
survived by a brother, Clifford Eric Berrien.
“Jackie believed in helping the underdog,” Ms.
Eversley said. “She always talked about how the
real movers of the civil rights movement were
unsung residents of small towns in the South
who risked lives and jobs to march and defy the
status quo.”
In her civil rights work, Ms. Berrien took the long
view.
“Will the workplace be more inclusive and
discrimination less common when my children,
my godchildren, or my nieces and nephews enter
it?” she asked in an interview with The
Washington Post in 2011.
“The essence of the work of advancing and
protecting civil rights in this country,” she added,
“is very much something where our ultimate
success will manifest in decades. It will be
measured by how different life is for someone
who is a child today.”
Sam Roberts, Jacqueline Berrien, Head of E.E.O.C., Is Dead at
53, N.Y. TIMES (Nov. 11, 2015), http://www.nytimes.com/2015/
11/12/us/jacqueline-berrien-head-of-eeoc-is-dead-at-53.html.

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