Panelist Profiles

2009 RAVEN LECTURER

Kevin Noble Maillard
Kevin Maillard is an assistant provessor of law at the Syracuse University College of Law.  He teaches in the areas of legal history, race, family law, and trust and estates. His work appears in the Michigan Journal of Race and Law, Law & Inequality, the American Indian Law Review, and forthcoming in the Fordham Law Review. His current book project reviews the impact of Loving v. Virginia in contemporary legal and social culture. Professor Maillard also coordinates the Angela S. Cooney Colloquium on Law and Humanities at Syracuse University.

Prior to joining the faculty, he was an associate at Hughes, Hubbard, and Reed in New York, where he worked with the Native American practice group. As a Ford Foundation Fellow, he earned a Ph.D. in Political Theory from the University of Michigan. At the University of Pennsylvania Law School, he was Symposium Editor for the Journal of Constitutional Law. He is a member of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma (Mekusukey Band).

 

CONVENING PANELISTS

Edgar Cahn
Edgar Cahn is Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Law, The University of the District of Columbia , David A. Clarke School of Law.  Where he teaches Law and Justice, and directs the Community Service Program. A co-founder with his late wife Jean Camper Cahn of the Antioch School of Law, UDC-DCSL’s predecessor, the first law school in the United States to educate law students primarily through clinical training in legal services to the poor. Together they served as co-deans from 1971 to 1980. In 1997, they received the Association of American Law School’s William Pincus Clinical Award for “Outstanding Contributions to Clinical Legal Education.”

In an effort to involve communities in promoting systems of self-help in the late 1980s, Professor Cahn began the Time Dollars project, a service credit program that now has more than 70 communities in the United States, Great Britain and Japan with registered programs (http://www.timebanks.org). His use of “time dollars” as an economic strategy for addressing social problems is described in his books, Time Dollars (1992) and No More Throw-Away People: The Coproduction Imperative (2004), showing how to mobilize a nonmarket economy that recognizes and rewards reciprocal contributions of service and caring.

In Washington, D.C., Professor Cahn founded and directs the Time Dollar Youth Court, in which teen juries judge cases of teens arrested for the first time for non-violent offenses. The Court, designated by the D.C. Superior Court to be housed at UDC-DCSL, hears 15 to 30 cases each week, approximately 800 cases per year. Professor Cahn was official advisor to the National Blue Ribbon Commission on Restructuring Juvenile Justice in the District of Columbia and is now Vice Chair of the Mayor’s Juvenile Advocacy Group.

With the publication in 1968 of Hunger, USA, and litigation he instituted, Professor Cahn initiated both the pre-eminent exposé of hunger in America and the first major national drive against it. In 1969, after years of research, and with evidence the Native American Task Force helped to gather, Professor Cahn published Our Brother’s Keeper: The Indian in White America. It substantiated and contributed to efforts that (1) ended the official policy of termination of American Indian nations, (2) embraced the right of self-determination, and (3) led to the enactment of Public Law 93-638, the American Indian Self Determination Act.

Robert T.Coulter
Robert T. Coulter is an attorney who focuses on Indian law and international human rights.  He is the founder and Executive Director of the Indian Law Resource Center in Helena, Montana and Washington, DC.  The Center provides legal assistance for indigenous peoples throughout the Americas.  He is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.

Born at Rapid City, South Dakota, on September 19, 1945.  Coulter received his bachelor’s degree from Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, (1966) and went on to get a degree in law from Columbia University Law School (1969).

Coulter is a past chairperson of the American Bar Association Committee on Problems of the American Indian, Section of Individual Rights and Responsibilities (1982-1984) and was a Ralph E. Shikes Visiting Fellow, Harvard Law School, November 1985.  He has published numerous articles and essays.  He was awarded the Lawrence A.Wien Prize for Social Responsibility by Columbia Law School in 2001 and the Bicentennial Medal by Williams College in 2002.  He is a longstanding member of the American Society of International Law.  He was a member of the Board of Directors of River Network, a national environmental organization, from 1998-2003.  In 2004, he was elected to the Supreme Court of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.

Troy Fletcher


Robert Garcia
Robert García is the Counsel and Executive Director of The City Project of Los Angeles which engages, educates, and empowers communities to achieve equal access to public resources. He is the Executive Director, Counsel, and founder of The City Project in Los Angeles, California. Hispanic Business Magazine recognized him as one of the 100 most influential Latinos in the United States in 2008, “men and women who are changing the nation.” He has extensive experience in public policy and legal advocacy, mediation, and litigation involving complex social justice, civil rights, human health, environmental, education, and criminal justice matters. He has influenced the investment of over $20 billion in underserved communities, working at the intersection of social justice, sustainable regional planning, and smart growth. He graduated from Stanford University and Stanford Law School, where he served on the Board of Editors of the Stanford Law Review. As reported in the New York Times, “The City Project [is] working to broaden access to parks and open space for inner city children, and . . . to fight childhood obesity by guaranteeing that . . . students get enough physical education.” N. Y. Times, Nov. 12, 2007. Stanford Law School called him a “civil rights giant” and Stanford Magazine “an inspiration.”

Mr. García has helped make community dreams come true for the Los Angeles State Historic Park at the Cornfield, Río de Los Angeles State Park at Taylor Yard as part of the greening of the Los Angeles River, and the Baldwin Hills Park in the heart of African American Los Angeles. The Cornfield is “a heroic monument” and “a symbol of hope,” according to the Los Angeles Times. The Baldwin Hills Park will be the largest urban park designed in the United States in over a century. He is working with the Acjachemen people to save the Native American sacred site of Panhe and San Onofre State Beach and to stop a toll road there. He is fighting to keep public lands open for all in Malibu and the Santa Monica Mountains.

Mr. García previously served as an Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York under John Martin and Rudolph W. Giuliani, prosecuting organized crime, public corruption and international narcotics trafficking cases. He helped release the former Black Panther leader Geronimo Ji Jaga Pratt from prison after 27 years for a crime he did not commit, working with Johnnie Cochran and others. He defended people on Death Row in Georgia, Florida, and Mississippi. He served as Western Regional Counsel with the NAACP Legal Defense & Education Fund, Inc. He has taught at Stanford Law School and UCLA Law School. He practiced international litigation at a large New York law firm.

Mr. García has published and lectured widely on law and society. He has lectured on the vision for healthy parks, schools, and communities at the conference celebrating the 150th anniversary of Central Park in New York City; at the Second National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit; at public interest law conferences in Dublin, Ireland; and at conferences at Stanford, Harvard, Howard, UCLA, USC, the Getty Center, the national Olmsted Conference in Seattle, Washington, and the Olmsted Conference in Portland, Oregon. Cardinal Roger Mahony appointed him to the Justice and Peace Commission of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. He is a Senior Fellow at the UCLA School of Public Policy and Social Research.


Cheryl Harris
Cheryl I. Harris teaches Constitutional Law, Civil Rights, Employment Discrimination and Critical Race Theory at U.C.L.A. School of Law.  Prior to joinging the academy in 1990, she spent after more than a decade in practice that included criminal appellate and trial work and municipal government representation as a senior attorney for the city of Chicago. As the National Co-Chair for the National Conference of Black Lawyers for several years, she developed expertise in international human rights, particularly concerning South Africa. Professor Harris was a key organizer of several major conferences both in South Africa and in the United States that helped establish a dialogue between U.S. legal scholars and South African lawyers during the development of South Africa’s first democratic constitution in 1994.

She is the author of leading works in Critical Race Theory including the highly influential “Whiteness as Property” in the Harvard Law Review. Her work has also taken up the relationship among race, gender and property amd most recently has focused on race, equality and the Constitution through the re-examination of Plessy v. Ferguson and Grutter v. Bollinger.

In 2002 Professor Harris received a fellowship from the Mellon Foundation to co-host a semester long interdisciplinary working group and conference series on “Redress in Social Thought, Law and Literature,” at the University of California Humanities Research Institute. She is a member of the Advisory Board of the Bunche Center for African-American Studies and is part of the Executive Council of the American Studies Association. Professor Harris is the recipient of the ACLU Foundation of Southern California 2005 Distinguished Professor Award for Civil Rights Education.

Rovianne Leigh
Rovianne Leigh is an associate at Alexander, Berkey, Williams, & Weathers LLP, and was its “ABWW Public Interest Indian Law Fellow.” Ms. Leigh is a 2005 graduate of Boalt Hall School of Law at U.C. Berkeley. While at Boalt, Ms. Leigh was active in the Native American Law Students Association; participated in the Boalt Hall Students Association as Co-Chair; and was a member of the Ecology Law Quarterly. She studied Indian Law at Boalt with Professor Philip Frickey and was a student in the Advanced Topics in Indian Law seminar taught by Prof. Frickey, Mr. Berkey and Mr. Williams. Her paper, “Renegotiating Law and History: Australian and American Approaches to Native Land Claims,” appeared  in the U.C.L.A. School of Law’s Indigenous Peoples Journal of Law, Culture and Resistance, in fall of 2005.

As a fellow at Alexander, Berkey, Williams & Weathers, Ms. Leigh represents clients, gaining exposure to Indian law by working in areas such as native land rights, protection of tribal environmental and cultural resources, health, Indian child dependency, employment and tribal law.

Justin D. Levinson
Justin Levinson joined the faculty at the University of Hawi’i, William S. Richardon School of Law in 2004. His research focuses on the intersection of psychology and the law, including empirical analysis of psychological concepts embedded in the law. In fall 2008, he founded the Culture and Jury Project, an interdisciplinary and international research collaboration devoted to facilitating the study of human decision-making in the law.

Professor Levinson previously practiced law at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati in Palo Alto, California, where he represented technology companies at various stages of development.  He has served as Visiting Assistant Professor at Beijing University, and as a Fellow at the Culture and Cognition Lab at UC Berkeley.  He has also taught courses in Australia and Israel. 

He received his BA at the University of Michigan in 1996 with distinction; J.D. University of California Los Angeles, 1999; LL.M. Harvard, 2004.

Marybelle Nzegwu
Marybelle Nzegwu was born and raised in Los Angeles, California.  She attended two years of high school in Watts, seeing firsthand economic and environmental injustice but not knowing how to address the problems she saw. She left Los Angeles at 17 to attend the University of California at San Diego where she majored in Political Theory and spent a year studying in Costa Rica. Nzegwu attended the University of California-Hastings College of the Law where she excelled in the Evans Constitutional Moot Court Competition and served on the Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly. During her first year at Hastings, she took Luke Cole’s Environmental Law class, where she heard the term Environmental Justice for the first time. After finding out more about the movement and about CRPE, she worked as an intern for CRPE both summers of law school. At CRPE, Nzegwu staffs the Civil Rights Project, working with CRPE’s civil rights clients nationwide and helping to build a coalition of supporters for a Civil Rights Restoration Act to restore the disparate impact standard to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.  When not working, Nzegwu has many interests, including playing the piano and learning the bass guitar.

 

Michael Alexander Pearl
Alex Pearl is an enrolled member of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma.  He is an associate in the Native American Affairs practice group at the law firm of Kilpatrick and Stockton in Washington, D.C.  Alex graduated from Boalt in 2007.  While at Boalt, Alex was active in the Native American Law Students Association and was on the California Law Review.  He had the opportunity to work as a research assistant to Professor Phil Frickey while taking his class on Federal Indian Law.  Alex also took the Advanced Indian Law Seminar at Boalt taught by Curtis Berkey, Scott Williams and Professor Frickey.  He co-authored “Honoring Sovereignty: Aiding Tribal Efforts to Protect Native American Women from Domestic Violence” which appeared in the February 2008 edition of the California Law Review.  Alex has also presented research at the University of California-Berkeley’s “New Voices in Indigenous Research Conference” in both 2005 and 2006.  After graduating from Boalt, he went on to clerk for Judge William Holloway Jr. of the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals in Oklahoma.  

Kimberly Thomas Rapp
Kimberly Thomas Rapp currently serves as the Director of Law and Public Policy for the Equal Justice Society, a national strategy group reshaping jurisprudence through progressive legal theory, public policy and practice.

Since June 2005, her work at the Equal Justice Society has included defending antidiscrimination laws and policies, facilitating programs to connect the academy with practice, and supporting leadership training for the next generation of scholars and advocates.

Prior to joining the organization, Thomas Rapp was a civil rights lawyer at a California-based law firm where she represented clients in matters pertaining to education and disability rights. She was an associate at a management consulting firm where she conducted independent fact-finding investigations for corporations and institutions in response to employee complaints and conducted trainings on state and federal anti-discrimination and anti-harassment laws.

Thomas Rapp earned her law degree from Stanford Law School. During law school, she was a law clerk for the East Bay Community Law Center, San Mateo Legal Aid, and the Contra Costa County Public Defender’s Office. She also interned with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Thomas Rapp continues to be involved in developing programs to educate, motivate and prepare youth of various backgrounds to make meaningful contributions to our society. She is also an advisor to community organizations and participates in diverse outreach efforts to benefit underserved members of our community. Thomas Rapp earned her undergraduate degree from the University of California, Berkeley.

Susan Serrano
Susan K. Serrano at the University of Hawai’i is the Director of Educational Development for Ka Huli Ao Center for Excellence in Native Hawaiian Law.  She oversees several of Ka Huli Ao’s projects, including its research and scholarship program, Post-J.D. Research Fellowship program, Ka He`e e-newsletter, and communications.  She also teaches Legal Practice I and Second Year Seminar. 

Prior to joining Ka Huli Ao, Ms. Serrano was a Special Projects Attorney at the Asian Law Caucus in San Francisco, California.  She was also the founding Research Director (2001-2005) of the national Equal Justice Society.  From 2000-2001, Ms. Serrano served as the Thurgood Marshall Fellow at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area.  Before joining the Lawyers’ Committee, Ms. Serrano clerked for the Honorable Robert G. Klein and the Honorable Mario R. Ramil of the Hawai`i Supreme Court. 
While in law school, Ms. Serrano served as the Articles Editor for the University of Hawai`i Law Review, worked at the Hawai`i Civil Rights Commission, and authored a chapter in E Alu Like Mai I Ka Pono – Coming Together For Justice: A Workbook For The Advancement Of Kanaka Maoli People.  She also won the Trina Grillo Award for Best Student Paper in Critical Race Theory for her article, “Rethinking Race for Strict Scrutiny Purposes: Yniguez and the Racialization of English Only”, 19 UNIV. HAWAI`I L. REV. 221 (1997).  Ms. Serrano has published in the areas of civil rights, critical race theory, Native Hawaiian rights, and human rights.  She also has co-authored amicus curiae briefs in major cases such as Grutter v. Bollinger and Doe v. Kamehameha Schools.  She is licensed to practice law in California and Hawai`i.

Robin Steinberg
Honored by the National Legal Aid and Defender Association for her “exceptional vision, devotion and service in the quest for equal justice,” by the New York Bar Association for her, “outstanding contribution to the delivery of defense services,” and awarded Harvard Law School’s Wasserstein Fellowship in recognition of her “outstanding contributions and dedication to public interest law,” Robin Steinberg is a leader and a pioneer in the field of indigent defense. A 1982 graduate of New York University School of Law, Robin has been a public defender her entire career. Starting as a criminal trial lawyer with the Legal Aid of Society, continuing her career as a founding member and deputy director of The Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem, and ultimately creating The Bronx Defenders in 1997, Robin has extensive experience in every aspect of public defense – from representing individual clients to creating a non-profit organization. From 1999 through 2001, she was a participant in the Executive Session on Public Defense, conducted by the Bureau of Justice Assistance and Harvard University. Today, Robin advocates nationally and internationally for holistic representation and the community defender movement, delivering papers, conducting trainings, and hosting visitors from around the world. She currently serves on the Boards of Directors for the New York State Defender Associations, Roger Williams Law School, and the Journal of Court Innovation, as well as on the New York City Alternative to Incarceration Board and the Center for Court Innovation Internal Review Board. She is a frequent teacher of trial skills to law students and professionals and a panelist and speaker about public defense management and holistic lawyering across the country and around the world. Robin is also the author of two articles: “Unprotected: HIV Prison Policy and the Deadly Politics of Denial”  (Harvard Journal of African-American Public Policy, 2005) and “Beyond Lawyering: How Holistic Lawyering Makes for Good Public Policy, Better Lawyers, and More Satisfied Clients” (NYU Journal of Law and Social Change, 2006).

R. Mona Tawatao
Mona Tawatao has been a regional counsel with Legal Services of Northern California (LSNC) since October 1999.  In this capacity, Ms. Tawatao directs and coordinates LSNC’s major land use and housing advocacy in its 23 county service area.  She is also currently on the leadership team of LSNC’s  Racial Equity Project.  Ms. Tawatao was part of the litigation team in Kenneth Arms, et al. v. Martinez filed in federal court in 2001, which resulted in the preservation of 351 affordable units for 30 years in four developments in Sacramento County occupied primarily by persons with disabilities, seniors and Russian speaking families. 
 
In 2002, Ms. Tawatao led the litigation in ACORN v. Kawamoto, which resulted in an injunction and settlement agreement that kept over 400 Sacramento and Placer County families from being simultaneously evicted from their rental homes and contributed to the passage of California’s 60-day notice law.  In 2005, she served as co-counsel in successful litigation defending against the building industry’s challenge to Sacramento County’s inclusionary housing ordinance, the only ordinance in the country requiring a specific set-aside for extremely low income families (North State Building Industry Association v. County of Sacramento).
 
Prior to joining LSNC, Ms. Tawatao worked for nine years at San Fernando Valley Neighborhood Legal Services (NLS) as a staff attorney and directing attorney where she focused on affordable housing development, tenants-rights and land use cases and school finance cases.  From 1988 to 1990, she clerked for the Honorable Consuelo B. Marshall in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles.  Ms. Tawatao received her J.D. from UCLA School of Law in 1986.  Ms. Tawatao received a Legal Aid Association of California Award of Merit in 2005 and a Reginald Heber Smith Award from the National Legal Aid and Defender Association in 2007.

Mary Christina Wood
Mary Christina Wood is Philip H. Knight Professor of Law and Luvaas Faculty Fellow (2007-08) at the University of Oregon School of Law. She teaches property law, natural resources law, public trust law, federal Indian law, public lands law, wildlife law, and hazardous waste law. She is the Founding Director of the school’s Environmental and Natural Resources Law Program and is Faculty Leader of the Program’s Conservation Trust Project, Sustainable Land Use Project and Native Environmental Sovereignty Project. After graduating from Stanford Law School in 1987, she served as a judicial clerk on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. She then practiced in the environmental/natural resources department of Perkins Coie, a Pacific Northwest law firm. In 1994 she received the University’s Ersted Award for Distinguished Teaching and in 2002 she received the Orlando Hollis Faculty Teaching Award. Professor Wood is a co-author of a leading textbook on natural resources law (West, 2006) and has published extensively on climate crisis, natural resources, and native law issues. She is a frequent speaker on global warming issues and has received national and international attention for her sovereign trust approach to global climate policy. Professor Wood is currently working on a book entitled, Nature’s Trust: A Legal Paradigm for Protecting Land and Natural Resources for Future Generations.

Eric K. Yamamoto
Eric Yamamoto is an internationally-recognized law professor at the University of Hawai’i William S. Richardson School of Law. He is known for his legal work and scholarship on civil rights and racial justice, with an emphasis on reparations for historic injustice. In 1984 he served as coram nobis co-counsel to Fred Korematsu in the successful reopening the infamous WWII Japanese American internment case, Korematsu v. U.S.. He worked on the legal team for Manuel Fragante in his accent discrimination case to the U.S. Supreme Court and for Alice Aiwohi in her successful Hawaiian Homelands breach of trust class action resulting in a state reparations settlement of $600 million. He has written amicus briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court, most recently as co-author in the Grutter v. Michigan affirmative action case and the Rasul v. Bush post-9/11 Guantanamo Bay mass detention case, as well as a recent amicus brief to the Ninth Circuit in Doe v. Kamemameha.

Professor Yamamoto has published two books and over fifty book chapters and law review articles. His first book on Interracial Justice (conflict and reconciliation among racial communities) received the Gustavus Meyers Award for Outstanding Books on Social Justice for 2000. His second book, Race, Rights and Reparation: Law and the Japanese American Internment, co-authored with Chon, Izumi, Kang and Wu, is receiving national attention in light of its relevance to the post-September 11th tension between national security and civil liberties in America. His recent articles include: “White(House) Lies: Why the Public Must Compel the Courts to Hold the President Accountable for National Security Abuses,” which provides a strategic roadmap for activists and scholars, and “Contextual Strict Scrutiny,” which coalesces a new methodology for Equal Protection judicial review. His earlier article, “Critical Race Praxis: Race Theory and Political Lawyering,” in the Michigan Law Review, was the centerpiece of a later law review symposium on strategies for connecting racial justice scholarship with frontline advocacy.

For the year 2001 Professor Yamamoto was awarded the Haywood Burns Chair in Civil Rights for New York, where he taught and lectured, and in 2000 he received the Rockefeller Foundation’s coveted Residency Fellowship for international justice scholars in Bellagio, Italy. In 1999 he taught as a visiting professor at his alma mater, Boalt Hall Law School, University of California at Berkeley. In fall 2006 he was a featured speaker at an international conference on “Racial Reparations: A Transatlantic Dialogue” in Tour outside of Paris, France. For spring 2007 he will be the Scholar-in-Residence at the Boalt Hall Law School’s Thelton Henderson Center for Social Justice, and for the fall he will be the Scholar-in-Residence at Hokkaido University Law School’s new Center for the Study of Ainu and Indigenous Law in Japan.

Professor Yamamoto has received eight outstanding law teaching awards, including the University of Hawai`i’s highest award, the 2005 Regents Medal for Teaching Excellence, and the Society of American Law Teachers’ nation-wide award as Outstanding Law Teacher for 2005. He has also received awards for his work on civil rights and social justice – most recently the Japanese American Citizens League – Honolulu Chapter’s 2006 Distinguished Public Service Award (with Chris Iijima) and the Patsy T. Mink Award for Social Justice in 2004. In his work outside the classroom, he trains law students and new lawyers interested in social justice as part of the “Scholar-Advocate” program he helped create. He is a founding member of the Equal Justice Society and has been a member of the Steering Committee of the Campaign to Restore Civil Rights. He speaks regularly across the country and internationally on issues of racial reconciliation, reparations, national security and civil liberties.