Mallika Kaur is a lawyer and writer who focuses on human rights with a specialization in gender and minority issues. Kaur has worked with victim-survivors of gendered violence for two decades, including as an emergency room crisis counselor, expert witness on intimate partner violence and sexual violence, researcher, and attorney. In South Asia, Kaur has worked on a range of issues including farmer suicides, female feticide, and transitional and transformative justice. In the United States, she has worked on issues of post-9/11 violence, policing practices, political asylum, and racial discrimination. She’s practiced family law in California including as counsel at ADZ Law, a San Francisco Bay Area family law and victims’ rights firm.
Kaur 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. She regularly trains lawyers as well as non-lawyers on cultural humility, elimination of bias, and negotiating trauma.
Mallika is a co-founder and Executive Director of Sikh Family Center, the only Sikh organization in North America 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. She believes what happens inside a home is intimately connected to what happens inside a community as a whole: since struggles are interconnected, commitment to justice must never be selective.
Kaur is the author of the book Faith, Gender, and Activism in the Punjab Conflict: The Wheat Fields Still Whisper (opens in a new tab) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). 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 | ![]() | Fall 2023 | 282.1 sec. 001 | Domestic Violence Law Seminar | Fall 2022 | 282.1 sec. 001 | Domestic Violence Law Seminar | View Teaching Evaluation |
---|
Victims Must Not Be Lost in Domestic Violence and Policing Debates
Lecturer Mallika Kaur asks what “defund the police” means in terms of response to domestic violence incidents, currently the single largest category of calls received by police?
Column: Negotiating Trauma and the Law
Lecturer Mallika Kaur, as part of her ongoing series exploring managing trauma and the demands of lawyering, speaks to critical race theorist and feminist legal scholar Angela P. Harris about challenging homogeneity of the profession and academy; the genius and struggle of women scholars; emotional intelligence for strong lawyering; the trap of “diversity” without power-sharing; and the potential of Juneteenth, 2020
Column: Negotiating Trauma and the Law
Lecturer Mallika Kaur, as part of her ongoing series exploring managing trauma and the demands of lawyering, interviews UC Hastings Professor Naomi Roht-Arriaza
Column: Negotiating Trauma & Law
Lecturer Mallika Kaur interviews a Fresno-based immigration lawyer to discuss the importance of giving clients more control and how to stay healthy while doing trauma inducing work, as part of her ongoing series exploring managing trauma and the demands of lawyering
Column: Negotiating Trauma & the Law
Lecturer Mallika Kaur, as part of her ongoing series exploring managing trauma and the demands of lawyering, interviews Dylan Nicole de Kervor of the Civil Rights Division of the US Department of Justice