Jill E. Adams
Executive Director, Center on Reproductive Rights and Justice
Jill E. Adams is the executive director of the Center on Reproductive Rights and Justice. Prior to joining Berkeley Law, Adams was the executive director of Law Students for Reproductive Justice for six years, guiding its transformation from a fledging organization to a sustainable institution and influential force in the national reproductive health, rights, and justice movement. Her service includes the vice presidency of the California Coalition for Reproductive Freedom, the Women’s Health Leadership Network at the Center for American Progress, the board of directors for the Habeas Project of Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, the advisory boards for Nursing Students for Choice and Real Reason, and the steering committee of Pharmacy Forward: Pharmacist Leadership for Reproductive Health. Adams has been an invited lecturer for courses on medical, law, and undergraduate campuses throughout the country and a featured presenter at numerous national and transnational academic and activist convenings. Her awards include the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Professional Development Fellowship, and her work includes litigation on gender-based employment discrimination at Equal Rights Advocates, representation of domestic violence survivors at the Family Violence Law Center, and advocacy for HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment among immigrants at Fundación CIMME in Seville, Spain.
Adams holds a bachelor of journalism from the
University of Missouri, Columbia and a J.D. from the University of California,
Berkeley. She is a member of the
California bar.
Brigitte Amiri
Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project
Brigitte Amiri is a Senior Staff Attorney at the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project. Brigitte is currently litigating a case involving South Dakota’s restrictive abortion law that includes a requirement that women first visit a crisis pregnancy center before obtaining an abortion, and is helping defend the federal contraceptive rule that requires employers to provide contraceptive coverage without a co-pay. Brigitte has also led the Project’s case challenging a ban on private insurance coverage for abortion in Kansas; a case involving trafficking victims’ access to reproductive health care; and she was part of the Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood legal team in the U.S. Supreme Court. Brigitte teaches a reproductive rights seminar at New York Law School, and serves on the Law Students for Reproductive Justice’s Board of Directors. Before joining the ACLU, Brigitte worked as an attorney at South Brooklyn Legal Services in the Foreclosure Prevention Project and at the Center for Reproductive Rights. Brigitte graduated from Northeastern University School of Law in 1999 and from DePaul University in 1996.
Ashutosh Bhagwat
Professor of Law, UC Davis School of Law
Ash Bhagwat joined the UC Davis School of Law faculty in 2011. Prior to
joining UC Davis, he taught at UC Hastings College of the Law for
seventeen years. Bhagwat is the author of The Myth of Rights, published
by the Oxford University Press in 2010, as well as numerous books,
articles, and book chapters on a wide variety of subjects, ranging from
the structure of constitutional rights, to free speech law, to the
California Electricity Crisis. Journals his articles have appeared in
include the Yale Law Journal, the Supreme Court Review, the California
Law Review, the Administrative Law Review, and the University of
Illinois Law Review.
Bhagwat is a summa cum laude graduate of Yale University, where he
received a B.A. with Honors in History. He is also a graduate of The
University of Chicago Law School, where he served as Articles Editor of
the University of Chicago Law Review. He then completed clerkships with
Judge Richard A. Posner of the United States Court of Appeals for the
Seventh Circuit, and Associate Justice Anthony M. Kennedy of the United
States Supreme Court. Prior to joining the Hastings faculty, Bhagwat
practiced appellate and regulatory law for two years in the Washington,
D.C. offices of the Sidley & Austin law firm.
In May of 2011, Governor Jerry Brown appointed Bhagwat to serve on the
Board of Governors of the California Independent System Operator, a
public benefit corporation responsible for running the high-voltage
electricity grid in California. Bhagwat is a member of the American Law
Institute, and in 2003 was awarded the Rutter Award for Teaching
Excellence at UC Hastings.
Caitlin Borgmann
Professor of Law, CUNY School of Law
Caitlin Borgmann, Professor, joined the faculty of CUNY Law in 2004. Her scholarship focuses on the respective roles and authority of the courts and the legislatures in protecting constitutional rights, and on the role and judicial treatment of fact-finding in constitutional rights cases. She has also written extensively about reproductive rights. Professor Borgmann received her B.A. from Yale University and her J.D. from New York University, where she was executive editor of the New York University Law Review. She clerked for Judge Robert P. Patterson, Jr., of the Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York and spent four years as a litigator at Davis Polk & Wardwell. After that she was the State Strategies Coordinator at the Reproductive Freedom Project of the ACLU for six years. In this capacity she was responsible for providing ACLU affiliates nationwide with legislative, legal, and communications advice and support. She also litigated reproductive rights cases. She has spoken widely about reproductive rights and given testimony before several state legislatures on this issue. Professor Borgmann is the editor of the Reproductive Rights Prof Blog.
Khiara Bridges
Associate Professor of Anthropology; Associate Professor of Law, Boston University
Khiara M. Bridges joins the BU faculty from the Center for Reproductive Rights, where she enjoyed an academic fellowship that was co-hosted and co-sponsored by Columbia Law School. She has written many articles on race and women’s experiences of reproduction, and is the author of Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a Site of Racialization, to be published by the University of California Press. Reproducing Race, which investigates race during the highly meaningful and palpably “reproductive” event of pregnancy, is an ethnography of the obstetrics clinic of a large, New York City public hospital. It interrogates how race is socially constructed through an analysis of the experiences of indigent women who must depend upon Medicaid and the public healthcare system in order to receive prenatal care and realize healthy pregnancies. Her scholarship has also appeared in the Columbia Law Review, the California Law Review, and the Texas Journal of Women & Law, among others.
She graduated as valedictorian from Spelman College, from where she received her degree in three years. She received her J.D. from Columbia Law School and her Ph.D., with distinction, from Columbia University’s Department of Anthropology. While in graduate school, she was a recipient of a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant awarded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. While in law school, she was a teaching assistant for the former Dean, David Leebron (Torts), as well as for the late E. Allan Farnsworth (Contracts). She was a member of the Columbia Law Review and a Kent Scholar. While in college, she was a counselor at the Feminist Women’s Health Center in Atlanta, gaining experience with policies affecting the availability of abortion services in Georgia. She has also been a reporter for the Miami Herald, speaks fluent Spanish and basic Arabic, and is a classically trained ballet dancer who continues to perform professionally in New York City. Professor Bridges will teach Critical Race Theory and Criminal Law at BU Law.
Jesse H. Choper
Earl Warren Professor of Public Law, Berkeley Law
Jesse Choper served as law clerk to Chief Justice Earl Warren of the U.S. Supreme Court following graduation from law school. He taught at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania from 1957 to 1960, and at the University of Minnesota Law School from 1961 to 1965. He joined the Boalt faculty in 1965. Choper has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, Fordham Law School, University of Milan, Free University in Amsterdam, Autonoma University in Barcelona, University of New South Wales in Sydney, University of Lucerne in Switzerland, and Catholic University of Portugal in Lisbon and Porto. He served as Boalt Hall’s dean from 1982 to 1992.
From 1979 to 1998, Choper was one of the three major lecturers at U.S. Law Week’s Annual Constitutional Law Conference in Washington, D.C. He has delivered 20 titled lectures at major universities throughout the country, including the Cooley Lectures at Michigan, the Stevens Lecture at Cornell, the Baum Lecture at Illinois, and the Lockhart Lecture at Minnesota. He has served on the executive committee of the Association of American Law Schools, and on the executive council of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (of which he has been vice president for the last ten years). He was national president of the Order of the Coif and is a member of the American Law Institute. In 1998 he received the UC Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award and the Rutter Award for Teaching Distinction at Boalt Hall in 2006. In 2005 the Boalt Hall Alumni Association presented Choper with the Faculty Lifetime Achievement Award and the University of Pennsylvania Law School gave him the James Wilson Award, its highest award for alumni.
Choper’s major publications include the books, Judicial Review and the National Political Process: A Functional Reconsideration of the Role of the Supreme Court, which received the Order of the Coif Triennial Book Award in 1982, and Securing Religious Liberty: Principles for Judicial Interpretation of the Religion Clauses. His recent publications include the tenth edition of his Constitutional Law casebooks; the seventh edition of his Corporations casebook; the second edition of The Supreme Court and Its Justices; “The Political Question Doctrine: Suggested Criteria,” in Duke Law Journal (2005); “Wartime Process: A Dialogue on Congressional Power to Remove Issues From the Federal Courts,” in California Law Review (2007) (co-author); and “Who’s Afraid of the Eleventh Amendment? The Limited Impact of the Court’s Sovereign Immunity Rulings,” in Columbia Law Review (2006) (co-author).
Caroline Mala Corbin
Professor of Law, University of Miami School of Law
Professor Corbin holds a B.A. from Harvard University and a J.D. from Columbia Law School. She was a James Kent Scholar while at Columbia Law School, where she also won the Pauline Berman Heller Prize and the James A. Elkins Prize for Constitutional Law. Following law school, she clerked for the Hon. M. Blane Michael of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. She then litigated as a pro bono fellow at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP and as an attorney at the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project. She completed a postdoctoral research fellowship at Columbia Law School immediately prior to joining the University of Miami faculty in 2008.
Professor Corbin teaches U.S. Constitutional Law I, U.S. Constitutional Law II, First Amendment, and Feminism and the First Amendment. Professor Corbin’s articles have appeared in the New York University Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review and Boston University Law Review, among others.
Sara Dubow
Associate Professor of History, Williams College
Sara Dubow is an Associate Professor of History at Williams College, where she teaches courses in women’s and gender history, recent U.S. history, and legal history. She received her PhD in U.S. History from Rutgers University. Her first book, Ourselves Unborn: A History of the Fetus in Modern America was published by Oxford University Press in 2010, and won the 2011 Bancroft Prize. She has a Mellon New Directions Fellowship for 2013-2014, and is currently a Visiting Researcher at Yale Law School, where she is taking classes and working on a project about the history of conscience clauses and reproductive politics.
Nancy Ehrenreich
Professor of Law, Denver University
Sturm College of Law
Nancy
Ehrenreich is a Midwesterner by birth, but has spent many years on the East
Coast and in Colorado. She attended Mount Holyoke College before completing her
undergraduate work at Yale, and later lived in Charlottesville, Va. for 13
years. After law school, she spent more than two years living in a small
village in Togo, West Africa. She speaks Kabiye, the local language of that
area, as well as fluent Spanish and rusty French. Ehrenreich is a member of the
national board of governors of the Society of American Law Teachers, which is
the country’s largest membership organization for law professors, and a leading
voice in the legal academy for defending academic freedom and promoting social
justice. She is also on the board of directors (and also co-chair) of LatCrit
Inc., a national organization dedicated to the development of critical
scholarship and pedagogy, and a member of the National Lawyers Guild.
Ehrenreich joined the University of Denver Sturm College of Law in 1989. She
was tenured in 1995 and promoted to full professor in 2002. In her spare time,
she enjoys skiing, riding her horse and spending time with her daughter, dogs
and cat.
Dan Grossman
Vice President for Research, IBIS Reproductive Health
Dan received his Bachelor of Science in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale University and an MD from Stanford University. He completed his residency in Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Prior to joining Ibis in 2005, he held the position of Health Specialist at the Population Council in Mexico City. His current research includes both clinical and social science studies aimed at improving access to contraception and safe abortion in the United States, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa, as well as evaluating the impact of integrating reproductive health and HIV services. He also coordinates the Oral Contraceptives Over-the-Counter Working Group. He has published over 50 articles in peer-reviewed journals and serves on committees for professional organizations such as the American Public Health Association and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Dan is also Assistant Clinical Professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences at UCSF and works as a physician part-time in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Diana Hortsch
Senior Director, Law School Initiative, Center for Reproductive Rights
Diana has extensive experience building programs and working with U.S. Law Schools. She is the former director of the Global Public Service Law Project at NYU where she also served as Lecturer-in-Law, teaching a course on comparative strategies for using law to bring about social change in a number of countries including India, South Africa, Kenya, Brazil, Argentina and China. She has also worked as an independent consultant providing services in the areas of human rights program development, education, and training to NGOs, universities, and funders. Most recently, she worked as a consultant for the Governance and Civil Society Unit at the Ford Foundation.
Diana is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College and New York University School of Law and a former clerk to Magistrate Judge Cheryl Pollak.
Sujatha Jesudason
Director, Core Align
Sujatha Jesudason, PhD is the Director of CoreAlign, an innovative “think and do tank” that brings together women’s reproductive health care providers, researchers, advocates and activists to design and implement a 30-year strategy to win resources, rights and respect for all people’s sexual and reproductive decisions. In addition, she is a researcher at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH), both at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). ANSIRH’s mission is to ensure that reproductive health care and policy are grounded in evidence. Dr. Jesudason earned her master’s and doctoral degrees in sociology from the University of California at Berkeley.
From examining the fault lines in efforts to curtail sex selection to exposing attempts to pit reproductive rights against disability rights, Dr. Jesudason works to forge unlikely collaborations and look past forced simplifications. With over 20 years’ experience as a researcher, advocate and organizer for women’s lives, Dr. Jesudason founded Generations Ahead, and has worked at Center for Genetics and Society, Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice, and 9to5 National Association of Working Women. She works at the intersection of issues too often considered separately: economic inequality, domestic violence, cultural norms, discrimination, gender roles and racial identity. In this, Dr. Jesudason merges not only topics but methods, from rigorous academic research to on-the-ground movement building, and from legislative education to media advocacy.
Her current research portfolio includes the practices and politics of sex selection in the United States, the intersection of reproductive rights and disability rights in prenatal screening, and the health and safety needs of women in the egg donation process.
Carole Joffe
Professor, Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health, UCSF; Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH); Professor Emerita, Dept. of Sociology, University of California, Davis University of California, San Francisco
Carole Joffe, PhD, is a professor at the UCSF Bixby Center’s Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) Program and a professor of sociology emerita at the University of California, Davis. Her research focuses on the social dimensions of reproductive health, with a particular interest in abortion provision. In January 2010, Dr. Joffe’s book, Dispatches from the Abortion Wars: The Costs of Fanaticism to Doctors, Patients, and the Rest of Us, was published by Beacon Press. Besides writing for an academic audience, she also writes frequently for the general public on the topics of reproductive health and reproductive politics. In 2010, Dr. Joffe received the Irwin Cusher Lectureship by the Association of Reproductive Health Professionals. In 2006, Dr. Joffe was awarded the Public Service Award by the Academic Senate of the University of California, Davis.
Recent publications include “Abortion and Medicine: A Sociopolitical History,” in M. Paul, ed., The Management of Abnormal and Unintended Pregnancy and “The Religious Right and the Reshaping of Sexual Policy: An Examination of Reproductive Rights and Sexuality Education,” in Sexual Research and Social Policy, Winter 2007 (with Diane di Mauro). She is the author of Doctors of Conscience: The Struggle to Provide Abortion Before and after Roe v. Wade (Beacon Press, 1995) and The Regulation of Sexuality: Experiences of Family Planning Workers (Temple University Press, 1986). Dr. Joffe received her BA from Brandeis University and her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.
Pamela S. Karlan
Kenneth and Harle Montgomery Professor of Public Interest Law and Co-Director, Supreme Court Litigation Clinic , Stanford Law School
A productive scholar and award-winning teacher, Pamela S. Karlan is also co-director of the school’s Supreme Court Litigation Clinic, where students litigate live cases before the Court. One of the nation’s leading experts on voting and the political process, she has served as a commissioner on the California Fair Political Practices Commission and an assistant counsel and cooperating attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Professor Karlan is the co-author of leading casebooks on constitutional law, constitutional litigation, and the law of democracy, as well as numerous scholarly articles. She also writes a column on the Supreme Court and legal issues for the Boston Review.
Before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 1998, she was a professor of law at the University of Virginia School of Law and served as a law clerk to Justice Harry A. Blackmun of the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge Abraham D. Sofaer of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Karlan is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers, and the American Law Institute and serves as a member of the Board of Directors for the American Constitution Society.
Allison Lauterbach
J.D. Candidate, Berkeley Law University of California
Allison Lauterbach is a J.D. candidate at the Berkeley Law
(Boalt Hall) and a Ph.D. candidate in U.S. history at the University of
Southern California. Her dissertation, The Politics of Reproduction
and U.S. Foreign Aid, 1961-2009, examines the global implications of
U.S. legal, political, and social change, relying on the domestic battles over
reproductive rights and their role in the transformation of American foreign
aid policies as a case study.
She is the Symposium Editor of the Berkeley Journal of Gender,
Law & Justice and has been awarded research fellowships and grants
from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the Radcliffe
Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential
Library, and the Center for Law, History and Culture at USC Law, among
others.
Kristin Luker
Elizabeth Josselyn Boalt Professor of Law; Professor of Sociology; Director, Center on Reproductive Rights and Justice, Berkeley Law University of California
Before joining the Boalt faculty and the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology in 1986, Kristin Luker taught in the sociology department at UC San Diego (UCSD) for 11 years. In 1993-94, she visited at Princeton University as the Doris Stevens Professor of Women’s Studies and Professor of Sociology. Luker was apponted to the Elizabeth Josselyn Boalt Chair in 2006.
She has received several awards, including Ford and Guggenheim fellowships, a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship and the Outstanding Faculty Award from the Alumni Association of UCSD. In 1997 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1993 she was chosen as one of three sociologists to meet with President Clinton to discuss “issues confronting the nation,” and in 1994 the White House solicited her testimony on teenage pregnancy.
Luker is the author of When Sex Goes to School (2006), Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (which received the Cooley Award and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize) and Taking Chances: Abortion and the Decision Not to Contracept. Her book, Dubious Conceptions, published in 1995, was selected as New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She is currently at work on her fourth book, tentatively titled Bodies and Politics, which is about sex education controversies in the United States.
Gillian E. Metzger
Stanley H. Fuld Professor of Law; Vice Dean, Columbia Law School
Professor Gillian Metzger writes and teaches in the areas of administrative and constitutional law, with a specialization in federalism. Her publications include: with Peter L. Strauss, Todd D. Rakoff, and Cynthia R. Farina, Gellhorn and Byse’s Administrative Law: Cases and Comments (Foundation Press; joined as editor 2007); Ordinary Administrative Law as Constitutional Common Law, 110 Colum. L. Rev. 479 (2010); Administrative Law as the New Federalism, 57 Duke L. J. 2023 (2008); Congress, Article IV, and Interstate Relations, 120 Harv. L. Rev. 1468 (2007),; Abortion, Equality, and Administrative Regulation, 56 Emory L.J. 865 (2007); Facial Challenges and Federalism, 105 Colum. L. Rev. 873 (2005), and Privatization As Delegation, 103 Colum. L. Rev. 1367 (2003). Professor Metzger joined the Columbia faculty in 2001, she was named the Stanley H. Fuld Professor of Law on oct. 1, 2011. Prior to coming to Columbia, Professor Metzger served as a law clerk to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge Patricia M. Wald of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Elaine Mui
Center Administrator, Center on Reproductive Rights and Justice
Elaine Mui is the Center Administrator for the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law & Policy (formerly Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Race, Ethnicity and Diversity) and the Center on Reproductive Rights and Justice at UC Berkeley School of Law. She is responsible for the overall administrative operations for the two academic research centers and supports law and policy program areas in education, immigration, voting rights, criminal justice, opportunity and inclusion, and reproductive justice. Prior to coming to the centers, she managed events and supported the operations of the Berkeley Law Dean’s office. In 1999, Elaine began her career in social justice at Asian Pacific Islander Legal Outreach in San Francisco as the outreach coordinator and later as program developer focused on fundraising and events. Elaine has been engaged on programs and legal assistance in the areas of domestic violence, elder abuse, immigration, and youth violence. She has also volunteered at numerous community organizations and has been a health educator. Elaine earned her B.A. in Anthropology from the UC Santa Barbara and holds certificates and training in event and project management.
Melissa Murray
Professor of Law, Berkeley Law University of California
Melissa Murray joined the Berkeley Law faculty in 2006. She teaches Family Law, Criminal Law, Advanced Topics in Family Law, and Constitutional Law.
Murray is a graduate of the University of Virginia, where she was a Jefferson Scholar and an Echols Scholar, and Yale Law School, where she was notes development editor of the Yale Law Journal. While in law school, she earned special recognition as an NAACP-LDF/Shearman & Sterling Scholar and was a semifinalist of Morris Tyler Moot Court.
Following law school, Murray clerked for Sonia Sotomayor, then of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, and Stefan Underhill of the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut. Murray is a member of the New York bar.
Her research focuses on the roles that criminal law and family law play in articulating the legal parameters of intimate life, and encompasses such topics as marriage and its alternatives, the legal regulation of sex and sexuality, the marriage equality debate, and the legal recognition of caregiving. Her publications have appeared (or are forthcoming) in the California Law Review, Columbia Law Review, Iowa Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Virginia Law Review, and Yale Law Journal, among others.
In 2013, Murray’s article, “What’s So New About the New Illegitimacy?,” was awarded the Dukeminier Awards’ Michael Cunningham Prize as one of the best sexual orientation and gender identity law review articles of 2012. Her article, “Marriage as Punishment,” won the Association of American Law Schools’ 2010-2011 Scholarly Papers Competition for faculty members with fewer than five years of law teaching. “Marriage as Punishment” was also selected by the Association of American Law Schools’ Section on Women in Legal Education as a winner of the 2010-2011 New Voices in Gender Studies scholarly paper competition. In 2010, Murray was awarded the Association of American Law School’s Derrick A. Bell Award, which is given to a junior faculty member who has made an extraordinary contribution to legal education, the legal system, or social justice. In 2011, Murray was elected to the membership of the American Law Institute.
Kimberly M. Mutcherson
Professor of Law, Rutgers School of Law Camden
Professor Mutcherson teaches courses on bioethics, torts, family law, South African constitutional law, and health law policy, specifically the global HIV/AIDS epidemic. Her scholarly work focuses on issues at the intersection of health law, bioethics, and family law with a particular interest in assisted reproduction. Her writing has appeared in the Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy, Harvard Journal of Law & Gender (on-line), Columbia Journal of Gender and Law, Nevada Law Journal, Minnesota Law Review Headnotes, and Yale Journal of Law and Feminism. Professor Mutcherson has spoken nationally on topics related to human subject research, reproductive technologies, reproductive justice, and health law.
Prior to joining the Rutgers faculty in 2002, she served as a Kirkland & Ellis Fellow at the HIV Law Project (HLP), where she continued to work as a staff attorney when her fellowship year ended. At HLP, she focused on impact litigation and policy work for underrepresented populations including women, low-income gay, lesbian and transgender individuals, and injection drug users. After leaving HLP, Professor Mutcherson was an acting assistant professor of lawyering at the New York University School of Law, where she taught legal research, writing, and other legal skills to first-year law students.
Professor Mutcherson is an associate with the Center for Children and Childhood Studies at Rutgers–Camden and, in 2006-07, was a fellow with the Rutgers Institute for Research on Women/Institute for Women’s Leadership Interdisciplinary Seminar on Health and Bodies.
Nancy Northup
President and CEO, Center for Reproductive Rights
Nancy Northup is the President and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, a global human rights organization that uses constitutional and international law to secure women’s reproductive freedom. The Center has brought groundbreaking cases before national courts, U.N. committees, and regional human rights bodies, and has built the legal capacity of women’s rights advocates in over 45 countries.
Ms. Northup joined the Center in 2003 with a rich mix of experience as a constitutional litigator, federal prosecutor, and women’s rights advocate, and a reputation for intelligence, passion, and creativity. “I look forward to a time when a woman’s right to control her reproductive life is secured as a fundamental human right, which cannot be denied in the name of religion, culture, or politics,” Ms. Northup declared at the time.
Since then, Ms. Northup has pursued that vision at the Center with bold, new strategies. Under her leadership, the Center has aggressively expanded its international program, including the launch of an international litigation campaign that has included the first abortion case decided by the U.N. Human Rights Committee and the first case to frame preventable maternal deaths as a human rights violation. Building on its established reputation as first-rate litigators, the Center has also taken the human rights framework into its work in the U.S. It is now documenting U.S. rights violations through fact-finding reports and holding the U.S. accountable before U.N. bodies that monitor compliance with international treaty obligations. In 2008, Ms. Northup led the Center to establish the Law School Initiative to promote legal scholarship and teaching on reproductive health and human rights, an emerging body of transnational law not yet widely taught in U.S. law schools. This ground-breaking effort will shape the thinking of the next generation of lawyers, judges, and policymakers through fellowships for recent law school graduates, a visiting scholars’ program, curriculum development, conferences, and publications.
Before coming to the Center, Ms. Northup was the founding director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. From 1989 to 1996, she served as a prosecutor and Deputy Chief of Appeals in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.
Ms. Northup graduated from Brown University and Columbia Law School, where she was a Kent Scholar and Managing Editor of the Columbia Law Review. She served as a law clerk to the Honorable Alvin B. Rubin of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans. Ms. Northup holds adjunct appointments at NYU Law School and Columbia Law School where she has taught courses in constitutional and human rights law. Ms. Northup was born in Kokomo, Indiana and grew up in New York, Texas, and California. She is a lifelong Unitarian-Universalist, who has taught Sunday school and is the immediate past President of the Board of Trustees of All Souls Church. She lives in New York City with her teenage son; her daughter attends Northwestern University.
Beth H. Parker
Chief Legal Counsel, Planned
Parenthood Affiliates of California
Radhika Rao
Professor of Law, University of
California Hastings College of the Law
Born in India, Professor
Radhika Rao moved to the U.S. when she was a year old, growing up in
Massachusetts. Professor Rao attended Harvard College, where she studied
Physics and Chemistry while anchoring for WHRB news and acting in various
plays. After spending a year working for a securities firm in Tokyo, she
decided to abandon science for a career in the law. She graduated magna cum
laude from Harvard Law School and served as Supreme Court Editor of the Harvard
Law Review.
After graduation, she clerked
for Judge Richard Cudahy of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh
Circuit and Justices Harry Blackmun and Thurgood Marshall of the United States
Supreme Court. Professor Rao teaches and writes in the areas of constitutional
law, comparative constitutional law, property, and the law of the human body.
She has been a visiting professor at Brooklyn Law School, the University of
Michigan Law School, and the University of Trento in Italy.
Professor Rao has written articles
on abortion, assisted reproduction, cloning, stem cell research, genetic
privacy, gene patenting, and property rights in the human body, some of which
have been translated into Italian and Chinese. She was a member of the
California Advisory Committee on Human Cloning, and currently serves on the
California Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research Advisory Committee.
In 2008, Professor Rao was
selected to be a Fulbright Distinguished Professor; she held the Trento Chair
in Law at the University of Trento, Italy. When she is not travelling, she
lives in Berkeley with her husband and daughter.
Kim Shayo Buchanan
Associate Professor of Law and Gender Studies, USC Gould School of Law, UCS Gould School of Law
Kim Shayo Buchanan specializes in constitutional law, international and comparative human rights law, prisoners’ rights, reproductive rights, race, gender and sexuality. Her current research addresses race, gender and prisoners’ rights against sexual abuse, and the sexual dimensions of gender equality. She teaches constitutional law, reproductive rights, and international human rights law.
Prof Buchanan earned her bachelor’s degree at Queen’s University and her law degree at the University of Toronto. She clerked for Chief Justice Isaac of the Federal Court of Canada (Appeal Division). She holds an LL.M. and J.S.D. from Columbia University.
Before her return to academia, Prof. Buchanan worked as a civil litigator at Sack Goldblatt Mitchell in Toronto, where she litigated constitutional claims for welfare and public health benefits, as well as litigating plaintiffs’ civil and constitutional tort claims against public authorities for malicious prosecution, wrongful conviction, and failure to protect. Most recently, she worked as a senior fellow at the Center for Reproductive Rights in New York City, where she authored Women’s Reproductive Rights in the United States, a shadow report to the United Nations Human Rights Committee (the implementation body of the ICCPR) on US noncompliance with its international law obligations to protect reproductive rights. Her publications include “Impunity: Sexual Abuse in Women’s Prisons” (Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, 2007) and “Lawrence v. Geduldig: Regulating Women’s Sexuality” (Emory Law Journal, 2007).
Neil S. Siegel
David W. Ichel Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science; Co-Director, Program in Public Law, Duke Law School
Neil S. Siegel is David W. Ichel Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science, co-director of the Program in Public Law, and director of the DC Summer Institute on Law and Policy at Duke University School of Law. Professor Siegel’s scholarship examines the U.S. Constitution’s federal structure; the constitutional principles governing claims of discrimination based on race, sex, and sexual orientation; and the dialectical relationship between constitutional politics and constitutional law. He teaches in the areas of U.S. constitutional law, constitutional theory, and federal courts.
Professor Siegel served as special counsel to Senator Joseph R. Biden during the confirmation hearings of John G. Roberts and Samuel A. Alito. During the October 2003 term, he clerked for Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the U.S. Supreme Court. He also served as Bristow Fellow in the Office of the Solicitor General at the U.S. Department of Justice, and as law clerk to Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.
In 1994, Professor Siegel received his B.A. (Economics and Political Science), summa cum laude, from Duke University. In 1995, he received his M.A. (Economics) from Duke University. He graduated in 2001 with joint degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, receiving his J.D. (first in class) from Berkeley Law and a Ph.D. in Jurisprudence and Social Policy. While at Berkeley Law, he served as the Senior Articles Editor of the California Law Review.
Ricky Solinger
Historian & Curator
Rickie Solinger is a historian and a
curator. Among her books are
Reproductive Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know (2013); Wake Up Little
Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race before Roe v. Wade (1992, 2000); Beggars and
Choosers: How the Politics of Choice Shapes Adoption, Abortion, and Welfare in
the U.S. (2001); and Pregnancy and Power: A Short History of Reproductive
Politics in America (2005). She is the editor of and co-editor of a number of
volumes, including, with Gwendolyn Mink, WELFARE: A Documentary History (2003).
She has co-edited Telling Stories to Change the World: Global Voices on the
Power of Stories To Build Community and Make Social Justice Claims (2008) and
Interrupted Life: Experiences of Incarcerated Women in the U.S. (2010). Her
exhibitions, many centering on reproductive justice themes, have traveled to
over 150 college and university galleries since 1992.
Stephanie Toti
Senior Staff Attorney, Center for Reproductive Rights
Stephanie joined the Center as a Litigation Fellow in 2006. She was promoted to Senior Staff Attorney in the U.S. Legal Program in 2010. During her tenure, she has been the lead on a number of critical cases across a spectrum of reproductive rights issues:
• She launched a wave of litigation in Oklahoma in 2008 when she led the Center’s challenge to a statute that imposed a host of restrictions on access to abortion. Ultimately, Stephanie helped win a ruling in 2012 from the Oklahoma Supreme Court that the statute was unconstitutional.
• She has also secured a permanent injunction against a Louisiana statute that stripped abortion providers of their medical malpractice insurance.
• In 2008, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit sided with the Center in a case that Stephanie argued, declaring that a Virginia statute that effectively banned the most common method of second-trimester abortion was unconstitutional.
• She is currently partnering with the city of Baltimore, Maryland, to defend a first-in-the-nation ordinance regulating the deceptive practices of anti-choice crisis pregnancy centers.
Before coming to the Center, Stephanie served as an associate at Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson, LLP. In addition, she clerked for the Honorable Nina Gershon, a U.S. District Court Judge in the Eastern District of New York. She is currently serving as an Adjunct Professor at Fordham University School of Law. Stephanie earned a J.D. from New York University School of Law and a B.A. from Fordham University, where she studied Public Administration and Mathematics.
Nicole Tuszynski
Manager, Law School Initiative Center for Reproductive Rights
Nicole joined the Center in 2009 as a Program Associate and was promoted to Manager of the Law School Initiative in 2012. She works directly with the Center’s faculty and organizational partners and is the direct liaison with undergraduate and graduate student groups across the country. Nicole has coordinated several conferences, including “Visualizing the Fetus: Implications of Mandatory Ultrasound Laws” at the University of Texas School of Law and “Gender Justice in the Americas: A Transnational Dialogue on Sexuality, Violence, Reproduction, and Human Rights.” She serves as a liaison for the Center’s partnership with Law Students for Reproductive Justice.
Nicole holds a master’s degree in Human Rights Studies from New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Studies, and a B.A. in Political Science from Stonehill College. Before joining the Center, Nicole worked as a research assistant on several academic projects.
Tracy Weitz
Associate Professor, Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology & Reproductive Sciences; Director, Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH), University of California, San Francisco
Tracy Weitz, PhD, MPA, is the Director of the Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) program and Associate Professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology & Reproductive Sciences, both at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). ANSIRH’s mission is to ensure that reproductive health care and policy are grounded in evidence. Dr. Weitz has a master’s degree in public administration with an emphasis in health care from Missouri Southern University and a doctoral degree in medical sociology from UCSF.
Dr. Weitz’s passion is for those aspects of women’s health which are marginalized either for ideological reasons, or because the populations affected lack the means or mechanisms to have their concerns raised. Her current research focuses on innovative strategies to expand abortion provision in the U.S. Included in her research portfolio is a demonstration project of the use of nurse practitioners, certified nurse midwives, and physician assistants as providers of abortion care in California, several studies of abortion regulation, and a national strategic plan to secure access to later abortion care.
In 1999 Dr. Weitz received the UCSF Chancellor’s Award for the Advancement of Women. In 2006, Dr. Weitz was appointed by Governor
Schwarzenegger to the Women’s Health Council, an advisory body to the California Department of Health Services. In 2008 she received the Felicia Stewart award from the Population, Family Planning and Reproductive Health section of the American Public Health Association. In 2012, she was awarded the Academic Sentate Distinction in Mentoring Award. Dr. Weitz serves on the board of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Northern California, Breast Cancer Action, and the Society of Family Planning.
Alyssa Wulf
Principal and Director of Programs, Real Reason
Alyssa has worked in cognitive linguistics for almost fifteen years, applying techniques of linguistic analysis to political problems, publishing original research, and teaching in both university and community settings. She is President and Principal at Real Reason, a nonprofit research organization in Oakland, CA, that works closely with partner organizations to identify the most innovative, constructive, and viable ways of reasoning and communicating about particularly challenging issues, from abortion to the role of government to our society’s growing inequality.
At Real Reason, Alyssa has guided analysis on issues across a wide range of policy areas, including reproductive rights, health, and justice; human rights; social and economic standards; sexuality education; and public health. Under her direction, Real Reason’s contributions in these areas have benefited a large community of advocates, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Berkeley Media Studies Group, and the Reproductive Health Technologies Project.
Alyssa holds an M.A. in Linguistics from Gallaudet University, a B.A. in Psychology from Wesleyan University, and has completed work toward a Ph.D. in Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley.