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

Ashley Renteria, Program Manager

396 Simon Hall, Berkeley Law
510-642-6969 (office)
arenteria@law.berkeley.edu

Ashley Renteria joined the Henderson Center in September of 2019 after graduating from UC Berkeley with a bachelor’s degree in Media Studies with a minor in Gender and Women’s studies in the Spring of 2019. 

While at UC Berkeley, Ashley participated in the Journalism school’s Bloomberg Business Journalism Program, published two articles for the Daily Cal’s “Sex on Tuesday” column, and was a mentor for the Sage Mentorship Project and Communities of Color decal. Ashley also was a general member of the Business Careers and Entertainment Club where she was on the creative TV/film project team.  

Ashley’s passion for writing and critique started in high school when she took a creative writing English course and was given opportunities to write essays on social justice topics that interested her personally such as the legalization of same-sex marriage, critiques of books that were assigned readings and more. Ashley has continued this passion throughout her education, going on to write essays on the intersection of U.S. politics and media in the 1960’s, performing identity via social media, media portrayals of sex and gender, intersections of race and gender in coming-of-age stories/ films, the framing of news stories at the L.A. Times and the Washington Post, and many more. 

In her spare time, Ashley enjoys reading the New York Times “Modern Love” column, curating music playlists that bolster distinct feelings of nostalgia, FaceTiming her mom, and trying new cooking recipes.

Education: 
B.A., University of California- Berkeley

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