Savala Nolan, Executive Director
396 Simon Hall
510-643-5402 (office)
510-642-3728 (fax)
savala@law.berkeley.edu
Savala Nolan joined the Henderson Center in January 2016, where she leads over 50 lectures, symposia, teach-ins, and skills-building workshops a year for law students, scholars, and activists. She spearheaded the creation of a Race and Law concentration, successfully endowed a new racial justice fellowship, and works closely with affinity groups and law journals to prepare students for a thriving social justice practice.
Nolan is the author of Don’t Let It Get You Down: Essays on Race, Gender and the Body. She and her writing have been featured in The New York Times Book Review, Vogue, Harper’s Magazine, Time, NPR, Forbes and more. She is a regular keynote speaker and panelist on social justice issues including implicit bias, structural racism, understanding Whiteness, and the importance of social justice work for all lawyers.
In addition to leading the Henderson Center, Nolan is a member of the Equity and Inclusion Committee. She previously served on the Faculty-Staff Climate Committee, chaired the working group on Institutional Knowledge, and served as an equity advisor to Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.
Prior to joining the Henderson Center, Nolan was Associate Director of the Damon J. Keith Center for Civil Rights at Wayne State University’s Law School in Detroit, Michigan. She practiced law at Keker, Van Nest & Peters LLP (then Keker & Van Nest) in San Francisco. Nolan also clerked for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and, in 2010, served as a law clerk in the Obama Administration’s Office of White House Counsel, where she prepared research memoranda on constitutional matters. Before law school, Nolan worked at the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Italy.
Education:
B.A., New York University
J.D., UC Berkeley School of Law
Jen Jones, Administrative Assistant
396 Simon Hall
Phone: 510-643-5723
jenjones@berkeley.edu
Jen has 15+ years of high-level administrative experience, most recently at Forte Consulting in San Francisco and Del Rey Elementary School in Orinda. She is an active volunteer, leading a Girl Scout Troop and coaching at Special Olympics NorCal. She holds a B.S. from Santa Clara University.
Nia Hilson, Event Coordinator
396 Simon Hall
nia.hilson@berkeley.edu
Nia joins The Henderson Center as an Event Coordinator with extensive experience in the university setting, including organizing symposia, student conferences, award shows, and more, most recently at Hult International Business School. She is passionate about creating meaningful impact through collaboration and teamwork and is looking forward to contributing to the ongoing success of our students.
Catherine Albiston, Faculty Advisor
Catherine Albiston joined the Berkeley Law faculty in 2003; she also holds affiliate appointments in Sociology and in Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley. At the law school, Professor Albiston teaches in the J.D. program and in the Ph.D. program in Jurisprudence and Social Policy. Her courses include Employment Discrimination, Sociology of Law, Social Movements and Law, Research Design, and the Advanced Interdisciplinary Writing Workshop on Law.
Professor Albiston’s research addresses the relationship between law and social change through a variety of empirical projects. Her current study of more than 200 public interest law organizations investigates how variation in strategy, structure and mission among public interest law organizations relate to access to justice. Her other work examines institutional factors that influence law students’ commitment to public interest careers, bias against workers based on race, gender, and caretaker status, and gender and racial disparities in STEM faculty hiring as well as the institutional factors that mitigate these disparities. Albiston’s multi-method empirical studies are based on original data from quantitative surveys, qualitative interviews, experimental methods, and archival research in legal and media archives. She has received several prestigious research grants from the National Science Foundation, as well as grants from the American Bar Foundation and the Law School Admissions Council.
Albiston’s publications appear in peer review journals such as Law & Society Review, Law & Social Inquiry, the American Journal of Sociology, and the Annual Review of Law & Social Science, as well as several law reviews. In 2010, Cambridge University Press published her book, Institutional Inequality and the Mobilization of the Family and Medical Leave Act: Rights on Leave. Her work won multiple prizes, including the Law & Society Association Article Prize, the Law & Society Association Dissertation Prize, and Honorable Mention for the W. Richard Scott Award for Distinguished Scholarship from the Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section of the American Sociological Association. In 2016, Albiston won the UC campus-wide Carol D. Soc Distinguished Graduate Student Mentoring Award for Senior Faculty, and in 2012-13 she was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. She also served on the Board of Trustees of the Law & Society Association.
Albiston is a graduate of Stanford University, where she received both her B.A. (psychology) and M.A. (sociology), and was a Fellow at the Center on Conflict and Negotiation at Stanford Law School. She is also a graduate of University of California, Berkeley, where she received both her J.D. and Ph.D., and was a Fellow at the Center for Working Families.
Following law school, Albiston practiced employment law at the Legal Aid Society of San Francisco/Employment Law Center as a Skadden Fellow and attorney. She then clerked for Susan Illston of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in San Francisco, and joined the law faculty at the University of Wisconsin Law School in 2001. Albiston is a member of the California bar, and is admitted to practice before the Ninth, Fifth, and Third Circuits and the U.S. Supreme Court.
Education
B.A., Stanford University (1987)
M.A., Stanford University (1989)
J.D., University of California, Berkeley (1993)
Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley (2001)
Core Faculty
Kathryn Abrams
Catherine Albiston
David Oppenheimer
Jeff Selbin
Eleanor Swift
Sue Schechter
Advisory Council
Abby Ginzberg
Thelton Henderson
Ellen Widess
Steve Zieff