Our Team

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. 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

Ian Haney López, Faculty Director

Ian Haney López is one of the nation’s leading thinkers on how racism has evolved in the United States since the civil rights era. He is the author of three books and his writings have appeared across a range of sources, from the Yale Law Journal to the New York Times.

Haney López’s current research emphasizes the connection between racial divisions in society and growing wealth inequality in the United States. His most recent book, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class, lays bare how conservative politicians exploit racial pandering to convince many voters to support policies that ultimately favor the very rich and hurt everyone else.

Haney López has written books on the legal construction of both white and Latino racial identity, respectively White by Law and Racism on Trial. A constitutional law scholar, he has also written extensively on how once-promising legal responses to racism have been turned into restrictions on efforts to promote integration.

The Earl Warren Professor of Public Law at the University of California, Berkeley, Haney López has been a visiting law professor at Yale, New York University, and Harvard, where he also served as the Ralph E. Shikes Visiting Fellow in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. He holds a master’s in history from Washington University, a master’s in public policy from Princeton, and a law degree from Harvard. In 2011, Haney López received an Alphonse Fletcher Fellowship, awarded to scholars whose work furthers the integration goals of Brown v. Board of Education.

Haney López’s personal website can be viewed here.

Education: 
B.A., Washington University
M.A., Washington University
M.P.A, Princeton University
J.D., Harvard University

Amalee Beattie (she/they), Program Manager

396 Simon Hall 
amaleebeattie@berkeley.edu

Amalee joined the Henderson Center in 2023 after graduating from Berkeley Law. While a law student, they were active in the Women of Color Collective and Law Students of African Descent. Her experience includes working with the East Bay Community Law Center, the Equal Justice Society, and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights San Francisco. During law school, Amalee was the main author of a proposal to increase critical engagement with the law in the 1L curriculum. Their advocacy led to Berkeley Law’s first Race & Law graduation requirement. 

Aside from her legal background, Amalee is a writer and convener of creative spaces. She served as visitor engagement coordinator at the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art during her leave from the J.D. program, where she found great satisfaction in cultivating a welcoming environment at the intersection of arts and social justice. Their own writing spans poetry, creative nonfiction/essays, and science fiction. Her work has been featured in The Ana magazine and she was a resident artist for RADAR Production’s BIPOC Queer Archives Residency in July 2023.

In their spare time, and when it’s warm enough, Amalee enjoys being outside in the sun.

Education:* 

B.A., Harvard College
J.D., UC Berkeley School of Law

*I would not be where I am today without the early education I received from my mother.