JLG Fall Symposium
When: Friday, November 15
Where: Wasserstein Hall, Milstein East
Time: 10:00am – 3:00pm
The conference is open to the public. Register now at www.tinyurl.com/jlg-symposium
Program
Gender Justice and the Carceral System
- D Dangaran (they/them): D Dangaran is the Director of Gender Justice at Rights Behind Bars, where they have argued federal appeals and litigated in federal district courts on behalf of people incarcerated in prisons and jails. They specialize in using litigation and other advocacy to help incarcerated trans people access necessary gender-affirming care. Rights Behind Bars employs a movement lawyering approach, working in conjunction with organizers on the inside and in the free world to bring non-legal advocacy alongside their cases.
D is a Filipino-Black non-binary trans femme / fairy hailing from and rooted in Wahiawā, Hawai‘i. They are a first-generation college graduate of Yale University and received their J.D. from Harvard Law School, where they were an articles editor on the Harvard Law Review. D was also a submissions manager and article editor for the Harvard Journal of Law & Gender, for which D won the student note competition in 3L year for their Note, Abolition as Lodestar: Rethinking Prison Reform From a Trans Perspective. After law school, they clerked on the District of Columbia Court of Appeals and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. D currently serves as the co-chair of the National Trans Bar Association. - Mariam Hinds: Professor Hinds is a Clinical Associate Professor of Law at Fordham University School of Law and a Supervising Attorney in the Criminal Defense Clinic. Her scholarship focuses on criminal law, criminal procedure, race, and gender and has been published or is forthcoming in the Georgetown Law Journal, the Stanford Journal of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, and the American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy, and the Law. Prior to joining Fordham, Professor Hinds was a Practitioner-in-Residence and served as the Acting Co-Director of the Criminal Justice Clinic at American University Washington College of Law. Prior to law teaching, Professor Hinds was a Principal at The Wren Collective where she provided strategic advising and did policy, legislative, and communications work for elected officials, grassroots organizations, and professional athletes on criminal justice and police reform issues. Before Wren, Professor Hinds was a supervising attorney and team leader in the Criminal Defense Practice at The Bronx Defenders.
- Kenda McIntosh (she/her): Kenda McIntosh has devoted over a decade to public interest work in various roles. She is currently an Assistant Federal Public Defender for the Eastern District of Missouri in the St. Louis office. Prior to becoming a Federal Public Defender, Kenda ran the criminal defense practice at Still She Rises, a non-profit organization in Tulsa which was founded to address the staggering rates of female incarceration in the State of Oklahoma. Before joining Still She Rises, Kenda served as an Assistant Public Defender at the Oklahoma County Public Defender’s Office where she worked on cases ranging from misdemeanors and juvenile delinquent matters to general felony and capital cases. Prior to her time in Oklahoma, Kenda worked as an immigrant rights fellow at the International Institute of the Bay Area in Oakland, California where she assisted undocumented people with various immigration matters and was a pro-bono attorney with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights in San Francisco, where she obtained Asylum for three families facing death in their home countries.
- Richard Saenz (he/him): Richard Saenz is Counsel and the Criminal Justice and Police Misconduct Strategist at Lambda Legal, the oldest and largest national legal organization committed to achieving full recognition of the civil rights of LGBTQ+ people and those living with HIV. Currently, Richard is lead counsel in Levy v. Green, et al. a challenge to Maryland Department of Public Safety’s denial of gender affirming surgery and commissary items for Ms. Levy and its discriminatory housing practices. In Roe v. Foley, et al., he represents Ms. Roe, a formerly incarcerated transgender woman living with HIV, who was put in solitary confinement for over six years due to an unconstitutional and discriminatory policy against people living with HIV. Richard’s legislative work includes coalition work on New York State’s Gender Identity Respect, Dignity, and Safety Act and the Stop Violence in the Sex Trades Act. He is part of the legal team in Chandler v. CDCR defending California’s SB 132, The Transgender Respect, Agency and Dignity Act, on behalf of intervenors.
- Moderated by Anna Lvovsky: Professor Lvovsky is a Professor of Law and an Affiliate Professor of History at Harvard University. At the Law School, she teaches courses on American legal history, the history of policing, evidence, and criminal law. Professor Lvovsky’s scholarship focuses on the legal and cultural dimensions of policing, judicial uses of professional knowledge, and the regulation of gender and sexuality. Her first book, Vice Patrol: Cops, Courts, and the Struggle over Urban Gay Life before Stonewall, won the 2022 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Studies, was the 2021 finalist for the Langum Prize in American legal history, and received an honorable mention for the 2023 Boswell Prize by the Committee on LGBT History. Her articles have appeared in the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the Journal of Urban History, and the Law and History Review.
State-Level Policy and Litigation Strategies
- Nneka Ewulonu (they/them/theirs): Nneka Ewulonu is a lifelong Georgian committed to elevating the voices of marginalized communities. A staff attorney at the ACLU of Georgia, Nneka’s work focuses on reproductive freedom, LGBTQ rights, racial justice, and First Amendment rights. They also are a board member of Access Reproductive Care Southeast, the region’s largest abortion fund. Nneka is a graduate of the University of Georgia with degrees in Biology and French, and the University of Georgia School of Law. They enjoy using their free time to bake and watch college football.
- Sapna Khatri: Sapna Khatri is the Director of the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Reproductive Justice Unit. Sapna is leading the new unit as it focuses on ensuring that Massachusetts remains a national leader on reproductive justice matters. Her work includes expanding and protecting access to reproductive and gender affirming care, addressing disparities in maternal health, tackling the harmful practices of crisis pregnancy centers, working across state lines to respond to national attacks on reproductive health care, and championing vital tools like comprehensive sex education and protections on data privacy. Prior to joining the Mass. AGO, Sapna worked as a Sears Clinical Teaching Fellow at the University of California Los Angeles, where she launched the school’s inaugural Reproductive Justice Externship Program. Sapna also led efforts to establish the nation’s first Medical-Legal Partnership at a Planned Parenthood clinic, in partnership with the UCLA Law Center on Reproductive Health, Law, and Policy, the Black Health Initiative at Planned Parenthood Inglewood, and the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles. Preceding her time at UCLA, Sapna served as a law fellow in the Women and Reproductive Rights Project at the ACLU of Illinois and later as the organization’s Advocacy & Policy Counsel for privacy, technology, and surveillance matters.
- Andrea Johnson (she/her): Andrea Johnson is Director of State Policy and Strategy and Senior Counsel at the National Women’s Law Center. In that role, she works with teams across the Center to build out an overarching vision and strategic framework for the Center’s state policy and advocacy efforts and a strategic plan for the growth of these efforts. Andrea also co-directs the State Gender Policy Collective, a joint initiative of NWLC and the State Innovation Exchange. Previously, Andrea served as NWLC’s Director of State Policy on the Workplace Justice team where she regularly provided expert legislative testimony on pay discrimination, sexual harassment, and pregnancy discrimination legislation and, alongside state advocates, played a lead role in the passage of such legislation in over a dozen states. Prior to joining the Center, Andrea was a law clerk for the Honorable Colleen Kollar-Kotelly on the United States District Court for the District of Columbia and the Honorable Eric T. Washington, Chief Judge of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals. Andrea served as a Legislative Aide for Congresswoman Betty McCollum from Minnesota before attending law school. She received a law degree from Columbia Law School and a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and French from Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. Andrea is a proud Midwesterner hailing from Mankato, Minnesota.
- Moderated by Molly Brady: Professor Brady is the Louis D. Brandeis Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, where she teaches property law and related subjects. Her scholarship uses historical analyses of property institutions and land use doctrines to explore broader theoretical questions. Her current research projects involve the relationship between covenants and zoning, the persistence of community knowledge in property doctrine, and the uses of history in state constitutional law. She is also an Associate Reporter for the American Law Institute’s Fourth Restatement of Property.
Gender Justice and Administrative Law After Chevron
- Vidhi Bamzai (she/her): Vidhi is Federal Policy Counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights. She joined the Center in 2023, where she engages in federal administrative advocacy related to reproductive rights. Her portfolio of work includes medication abortion, data privacy, denial of care issues, and Chevron deference. Prior to joining the Center, Vidhi was a litigator at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Jackson, Mississippi, where she represented adult and youth immigrants across the South. She also represented children and adults incarcerated in Mississippi correctional facilities on conditions of confinement issues. Vidhi graduated from the Boston University School of Law in 2018 where she was a Public Interest Scholar and President of the Women’s Law Association. Originally from Michigan, Vidhi resides in Jackson, Mississippi, about two miles from the site of the former Jackson Women’s Health Clinic, which was the clinic at the center of the Dobbs case.
- Stephanie Bornstein: Professor Stephanie Bornstein teaches and writes in the areas of employment and labor law, antidiscrimination law, and procedural law. Her scholarship focuses on legal and administrative strategies to reduce racial and gender inequality in the workplace and ensure access to justice in civil litigation. Current projects develop new approaches to close racial and gender pay gaps, challenge the impact of forced arbitration on structural legal change, and foster public/private partnerships to better enforce public law. In 2019-2020, Professor Bornstein served as the Chair of the AALS Section on Employment Discrimination Law. Since 2020, she has served as Co-Director of the Pay Equity & Living Wage Project of the Center for Comparative Equality and Anti-Discrimination Law at U.C. Berkeley Law School.
- Sunu P. Chandy (she/her): Sunu is a Senior Advisor with Democracy Forward. Sunu has served as a civil rights lawyer for over 20 years including in the context of workers’ rights, gender justice, and LGBTQ+ rights. She is also a published poet, and the author of the award-winning collection, My Dear Comrades. Before joining Democracy Forward, Sunu served as Legal Director of the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) for six years until August 2023. Before NWLC, Sunu served as the Deputy Director for the Civil Rights Division with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), where she led civil rights enforcement including under Section 1557 of the ACA. Before that, Sunu and her family moved to DC in the Fall of 2014 when she was recruited into the General Counsel role at the DC Office of Human Rights (OHR), and there she oversaw the agency’s civil rights legal determinations, including matters of first impression under the Fair Criminal Record Screening Act. Previously, Sunu was a federal attorney with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in the New York District Office for 15 years and litigated cases based on race, sex, national origin, disability, age and religion-based discrimination.
- Moderated by Sharon Block: Sharon Block is a Professor of Practice and Executive Director of the Center for Labor and a Just Economy at Harvard Law School. Prior to returning to Harvard, she served as the senior official delegated the duties of the Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in President Joe Biden’s White House. She also served as a senior advisor to the Biden-Harris Transition team, providing advice to the policy, OMB and Labor Agency Review teams on labor, worker empowerment and regulatory policy and participating in briefing and hearing preparation for nominees.