The Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice has named leading public interest lawyer Diane T. Chin as associate director. Chin, director of Stanford’s Center for Public Service and Public Interest Law since 2003, brings nearly 20 years of experience to the Henderson Center as a public interest practitioner and scholar.
Drawn to Boalt by the “possibility of working with the top public interest law school in the country,” Chin said that under the leadership of Dean Edley and Henderson Center Director Mary Louise Frampton, “Boalt is well-positioned to become the standard-bearer of social justice education in a way that will affect the lives of students and impact the field after graduation.”
At Stanford, Chin developed a successful and highly regarded public service program that integrates the practical aspects of working with students and intellectual and academic pursuits involved in public interest education. The program, which serves as a model for other law schools, brings under one roof such disparate elements of social justice training as career services, speaker series, and specialized curriculum.
Prior to her work at Stanford, Chin served as executive director of Chinese for Affirmative Action for five years and as senior trial attorney for the San Francisco Police Commission Office of Citizen Complaints between 1996 and 1998. As director of the Racial Violence Project and a staff attorney for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 1990s, Chin represented individual victims of hate violence and worked with police departments to develop the tools and skills necessary for effective investigation of hate crimes.
Chin spent a year as a Skadden Fellow and staff attorney for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights in Boston from 1989 to 1990. She earned a bachelor’s degree in history from Mills College and holds a J.D. from Northeastern University School of Law.