Mallika Kaur

Mallika Kaur is an author, lawyer, teacher and community organizer who focuses on human rights with a specialization in gender and minority issues. She has worked with victim-survivors of gendered violence for two decades, including as an emergency room crisis counselor, expert witness on domestic violence and sexual violence, researcher, and attorney.

 Mallika is the co-founder and Executive Director (as of 2021) of Sikh Family Center, the only Sikh American organization focused on gender-based violence. Working with local civil society, academic institutions, advocacy organizations, and government agencies, she combines research, advocacy, scholarship, and the law as an approach towards sustainable change.

Mallika received her Master in Public Policy from the Kennedy School at Harvard and JD from UC Berkeley Law School, where she currently teaches Domestic Violence Law and other skills-based and experiential social justice classes, including the course she created on “Negotiating Trauma, Emotions & the Practice of Law.” 

Mallika believes what happens inside a home is intimately connected to what happens inside communities as a whole: since struggles are interconnected, commitment to justice must never be selective. In South Asia, she has worked on a range of issues including farmer suicides, female feticide, and transitional and transformative justice. In the United States, Mallika has worked on issues including post-9/11 violence, policing practices, political asylum, and racial discrimination. She is Of Counsel at ADZ Law, a San Francisco Bay Area family law firm focused on helping families in transition. 

Mallika is the author of the book “Faith, Gender, and Activism in the Punjab Conflict: The Wheat Fields Still Whisper” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). She writes regularly for online and print media as well as academic publications; her work has been published in Foreign Policy, Washington Post, Ms. Magazine, and California Law Review, among others. Mallika trains lawyers as well as non-lawyers on cultural humility, elimination of bias, and negotiating trauma. She is currently co-editing a book on invitation from Edward Elgar Publishing, “How to Account for Trauma and Emotions in Legal Teaching” (forthcoming, 2024).

Education

B.A., University of Chicago
J.D., UC Berkeley School of Law
M.P.P., Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

Mallika Kaur is teaching the following courses in Spring 2023:

• 283Q sec. 001 - Domestic Violence Field Placement Classroom Component: Ethics in Practice
• 287.11 sec. 001 - Negotiating Trauma, Emotions & the Practice of Law
• 295.6J sec. 001 - Domestic Violence Field Placement

Courses During Other Semesters

Semester	Course Num	Course Title	Teaching Evaluations
Fall 2023	282.1 sec. 001	Domestic Violence Law Seminar
Fall 2022	282.1 sec. 001	Domestic Violence Law Seminar	View Teaching Evaluation