Dates of advising: January 24-26

Andrew Boyle is Counsel in the Liberty & National Security Program of the Brennan Center for Justice, where, among other matters, he focuses on emergency powers. He has held fellowships with the Truman National Security Project, the National Endowment for Democracy, and the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs. He is also co-chair of the American Society for International Law’s (ASIL) International Criminal Law Interest Group, is a member of the Executive Committee of ASIL’s Lieber Society on the Law of Armed Conflict, and has served as an observer at the Guantanamo Military Commissions.

Prior to joining the Brennan Center, Boyle prosecuted senior Khmer Rouge leaders on behalf of the United Nations for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. He has also served in the trial chambers of the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, where he worked on cases resulting from the 1994 genocide, completed a fellowship in the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program, and clerked for The Honorable Helene N. White of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Boyle graduated from UCLA School of Law and its Epstein Program in Public Interest Law and Policy, where he was an articles editor for the Journal of International Law and Foreign Affairs.

Dates of advising: September 22-24

Jia Min Cheng is a supervising attorney at Disability Rights California (“DRC”), the largest protection and advocacy agency in the United States. As a member of DRC’s Advocacy and Community Engagement practice group, she supervises a team of advocates and attorneys providing support to persons with disabilities primarily in the legal areas of housing and health.

Jia Min has committed her career to public interest work. Prior to DRC, Jia Min worked at Bay Area Legal Aid for eleven years. From 2011-2017, she directed a Medical-Legal Partnership (“MLP”) with the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center (“ZSFG”). In addition to providing wraparound legal services for ZSFG patients, she trained University of California San Francisco medical students and residents, and San Francisco Department of Public Health staff on civil legal options to address their patients’ social determinants of health. In 2017, she received both a Heroes & Hearts award from the San Francisco General Hospital Foundation and a Certificate of Honor from the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for her MLP work with ZSFG.

Using her years of experience at ZSFG, Jia Min was instrumental in the design and launch of an MLP between Bay Area Legal Aid and the Community Health Center Network in Alameda County. This successful partnership focused on helping to stabilize the lives of Medicaid high-utilizer patients by working closely with their community health workers to address potential legal issues upstream. In addition to directing several of Bay Area Legal Aid’s MLPs, Jia Min served as a mentor for the organization’s MLP attorneys and MLP fellows in the Alameda, Contra Costa, and Santa Clara regional offices.

Although a generalist with a zeal for wraparound legal services, Jia Min’s primary passion is in housing law. Jia Min’s housing experience includes extensive volunteer work with the National Housing Law Project and the San Francisco Justice & Diversity Center’s Housing Negotiation Project. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of California, Davis and her Doctor of Jurisprudence degree from the University of Oregon School of Law.

Dates of advising: November 1-3

Abre’ Conner, as the Directing Attorney of Health, leads the Law Foundation of Silicon Valley’s litigation, direct legal services, and advocacy regarding health equity and the social determinants of health that impact historically excluded communities across Silicon Valley. Additionally, Abre’ sits on the Law Foundation’s race, equity, and inclusion steering committee and leads work regarding jail conditions in Santa Clara County. At the Law Foundation, Abre’ specifically focuses her team’s work in community and movement lawyering that centers Black, Indigenous, AAPI, and Latinx communities. She supervises a team of nearly twenty staff and regularly advises law students on paths to public interest law. Over the years, Abre’ continues to work with organizers, activists, and community groups who help ground her practice.

Prior to this position, she was a staff attorney with the ACLU Foundation of Northern California, where she advocated for the civil rights and liberties of people in the Central Valley and Northern California. She regularly represented activists, students and parents, and organizers in a myriad of issues including free speech and education rights issues. She also litigated racial justice cases such as MediaJustice v. FBI, a FOIA action for records related to FBI surveillance of Black people and Black-led organizations. She also led content moderation negotiations with Facebook regarding removal of Black creator content. Previously, Abre’ worked at the Center on Race, Poverty, and the Environment, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights, and on Capitol Hill. She was also an associate in the White House Office of Presidential Personnel in 2012.

A graduate of American University, Washington College of Law and the University of Florida, she has been named a top 40 under 40 Nation’s Best Advocate by the National Bar Association, 40 Gators under 40 by the University of Florida Alumni Association, a top 100 leader by Fresno Black Chamber of Commerce, Community Champion by Fresno Building Healthy Communities, Community Service Award from the Iranian American Bar Association- Nor Cal chapter, Fearless Children’s Lawyer by the American Bar Association, and featured in Zeta Phi Beta’s national magazine, New York Times’ The Daily, American Bar Association Journal, and Cosmopolitan Magazine.

Abre’ is regularly on the faculty for education law, civil rights, and free speech issues at colleges and universities including the University of California-Davis. She also serves as the elected Assembly Clerk for the American Bar Association Young Lawyers Division. Later this year, she will ascend to be Assembly Speaker, the chief policy officer for the Division. Outside of work and prior to COVID-19, she received the Trifecta award for completing three Spartan races (sprint, super, and beast) in one year.

Dates of advising: October 13-15

Olivia Ensign is a Staff Attorney with the ACLU Capital Punishment Project. Olivia represents clients in capital cases at the trial, direct appeal, and post-conviction levels across the southern United States. In 2019, Olivia was named as one of Forbes Magazine’s 30 under 30 for her ongoing work with the Capital Punishment Project. Olivia graduated with High Honors from Swarthmore College with a B.A. in Political Science and Peace and Conflict Studies, and from New York University School of Law where she was a Root-Tilden-Kern Public Interest Scholar and Institute for International Law and Justice Scholar.

Dates of advising: October 20-22

Elizabeth Forsyth is a Senior Attorney in Earthjustice’s Biodiversity Defense Program where she brings cases to address the biodiversity crisis across the United States. This has included working to ensure Endangered Species Act protection for species such as the Pacific fisher, coastal California gnatcatcher, California spotted owl, and Mexican wolf; protecting habitat from destruction from mining, including in the Boundary Waters of Minnesota and the Cabinet-Yaak region of Montana; and stopping the Trump Administration’s risky oil and gas giveaway of public lands in Montana and California.

Prior to her role in the Biodiversity Defense Program, Elizabeth was an Associate Attorney in Earthjustice’s California Regional office in Los Angeles, where she worked primarily on matters aimed at curtailing new oil and gas drilling and other fossil fuel infrastructure projects in California, and cleaning up some of the dirtiest air basins in the country in Los Angeles and the San Joaquin Valley.

Prior to joining Earthjustice, Elizabeth was a Beagle/HLS Fellow in the Natural Resources Defense Council’s litigation team in San Francisco and clerked for the Honorable Thomas S. Zilly in the Western District of Washington. She has a law degree from Harvard, where she was a Managing Editor of the Harvard Environmental Law Review, and an undergraduate degree in environmental science from Brown. Prior to law school, she worked at the Environmental Protection Agency Region IX on issues related to solid waste and recycling on tribal land. She currently resides in Seattle, Washington, with her filmmaker husband and two small children.

Dates of advising: October 27-29

Brian currently works as a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy & Technology Project, where he focuses on free expression issues. Since joining the ACLU in 2012, he has worked on a number of cutting-edge cases at the forefront of constitutional law. He has argued in numerous federal and state trial and appellate courts, consulted with Members of Congress about constitutional issues posed by federal legislation, and discussed First Amendment issues in prominent national and global media outlets.

Brian has been the lead counsel in cases striking down laws restricting participation in politically-motivated boycotts, prohibiting the use of terms like “burger” to accurately describe plant-based products (such as “veggie burgers”), and restricting the right to protest outside courthouses. He also has experience defending defamation lawsuits, challenging “fake news” laws, and challenging government retaliation against individuals or groups based on their protected speech. He has authored or co-authored numerous Supreme Court amicus briefs on behalf of the ACLU and other groups.

Prior to assuming his current position, Brian served for several years as a staff attorney with the ACLU’s Center for Liberty, where he focused on religious refusals to comply with anti-discrimination laws. In that capacity, he litigated cases involving anti-LGBT discrimination by employers and businesses, refusals to provide reproductive healthcare – including emergency care – at Catholic hospitals, and religious restrictions on access to reproductive healthcare in government-funded programs. He also spent two years as the ACLU’s William J. Brennan Fellow. Brian graduated magna cum laude from Yale University and Harvard Law School. After graduating from law school, he served as a law clerk to the Hon. Marsha S. Berzon of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Dates of advising: January 19-21

Dru Levasseur is the Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for the National LGBTQ+ Bar Association. As a leading figure in the LGBTQ+ equality movement for 25 years, 15 of which in the legal profession, Dru has extensive experience in law, advocacy, philanthropy, and community organizing. He leads the LGBTQ+ Bar’s DEI Consulting Practice, Lavender Law 365®, the only LGBTQ+ inclusion coaching and consulting program designed specifically to enable the implementation of best practice standards for LGBTQ+ equity across law firms, law schools, and companies.

Previously, Dru was Senior Attorney and Transgender Rights Project Director for Lambda Legal, the nation’s oldest and largest legal organization committed to achieving full recognition of the civil rights of LGBTQ+ people and people living with HIV. From 2009 to 2019, a critical time in history for advancing the civil rights of transgender people, Dru led Lambda Legal’s transgender rights work through strategy development, impact litigation, policy advocacy, and public education. He served as counsel in landmark impact litigation cases and amicus briefs in federal courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court. Dru represented Robina Asti, a 92-year-old WWII veteran, in a successful challenge to the Social Security Administration, leading to clarified policy for fairly processing survivor’s benefits. In McCreery v. Don’s Valley Market, he secured a landmark settlement before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for a transgender woman fired after transitioning in the workplace. He was co-counsel in Esquivel v. Oregon, resulting in the removal of discriminatory restrictions on transition-related health care for all transgender employees of the State of Oregon, and in Fields v. Smith, a federal case successfully challenging a discriminatory Wisconsin law barring its Department of Corrections from providing medically necessary care for transgender inmates. Under Dru’s decade of leadership, Lambda Legal’s transgender rights litigation docket more than tripled, integrating transgender rights across all areas of work, including health care, employment, education, criminal justice, housing and family law.

Dru was instrumental in the creation and development of Lambda Legal’s Transgender Rights Project in 2013, as well as Lambda’s most popular online publication, the Transgender Toolkit. He led the coalition work to publish the first Trans-Affirming Model Hospital Policy with the New York City Bar Association, Hogan Lovells, Proskauer Rose LLP, and the Human Rights Campaign. The guide has been well-received nationally by hospitals and adopted by government officials. As lead on Lambda Legal’s transgender rights advocacy efforts, Dru participated in the White House’s first transgender policy meeting in 2011, and met regularly with key federal, state and local officials, advising on development and implementation of policy. He represented Lambda Legal in international forums, including the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, and transgender rights INCLO convenings in Cape Town, South Africa and Buenos Aires, Argentina. A thought leader on cutting-edge issues, Dru authored “Gender Identity Defines Sex: Updating the Law to Reflect Modern Medical Science Is Key to Transgender Rights,” published by Vermont Law Review and excerpted in the book Love Unites Us, highlighting the future of LGBTQ+ rights.

Prior to joining Lambda Legal, Dru was the first staff attorney at Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund, and before that, served as a law clerk in the Massachusetts Superior Court. In 2007, Dru co-founded the Jim Collins Foundation, a trans-led national nonprofit that funds surgeries for transgender people in need, funding twenty surgeries in ten years. He continues to serve as a working group member for Grantmakers United for Trans Communities. Dru also serves on the boards of the ERA Coalition and Fund for Women’s Equality.

Dru graduated cum laude from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He earned his law degree in 2006 from Western New England University School of Law. He is admitted to practice in DC, NY, GA, and MA.

Dates of advising: October 4-6

Betsy Miller is a seasoned litigator and industry thought leader on leadership development and organizational change management. With over 20 years in private and government practice in Washington, D.C., Betsy has built a reputation for deftly leading some of the country’s highest profile government litigation and investigations. As Chair of Cohen Milstein’s Public Client Practice, Betsy currently represents state Attorneys General in the ongoing national opioid litigation. She previously negotiated a $2.2 billion resolution as a lead counsel for states prosecuting consumer fraud cases against the nation’s largest credit rating agencies. Her approach to these complex cases is grounded in the principles she has used as a professional mediator and in her fifteen years as an adjunct professor at Georgetown Law, where she has taught courses on negotiation strategy and conflict resolution. A certified leadership coach, Betsy regularly speaks and writes on the changing legal landscape and talent development for the 21st century lawyer, with a focus on advancing women and diversity in the legal profession.

Before joining Cohen Milstein, Betsy had a distinguished career in public service. She served as the Chief of Staff and Senior Counsel to the Attorney General for the District of Columbia, the seventh-largest Attorney General’s Office in the country, with roughly 400 lawyers. There, she helped lead the historic transition of the D.C. Public School system, working closely with Chancellor Michelle Rhee and supervising the newly integrated legal teams across multiple D.C. agencies. She also partnered with Ken Feinberg to design a mediation program to better address special education disputes within DCPS. Betsy previously served on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee as Nominations Counsel to Senator Patrick J. Leahy (D-VT).

Betsy earned her bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College, graduating magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. She went on to receive her J.D. from Harvard Law School, where she was the Technical Editor of the Harvard Human Rights Journal and an Editor on the Harvard Latinx Law Review. Betsy was a recipient of Harvard Law School’s post-graduate Heyman Fellowship for federal government service and academic excellence and the Kaufman Fellowship for public service. Following law school, she clerked for the Honorable Thomas Penfield Jackson on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, working on the Iran-Contra hostage reparations cases.

Dates of advising: October 18-20

Dana Mulhauser is the founding chief of the Independent Investigations Unit of the Maryland Attorney General’s Office. The unit was created by statute in 2021 as part of a package of police reforms throughout the state. It is charged with overseeing the investigation of all police-involved fatalities in the state of Maryland. 

From 2019 to 2021, she was the founding chief of the Conviction and Incident Review Unit at the St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office. The unit investigates and prosecutes all cases involving misconduct by public officials, including police shootings and other excessive uses of force. It brought some of the first excessive force cases and police shooting cases in St. Louis County in decades. The unit also created a conviction review process to examine prior convictions for claims of innocence or official misconduct. 

Prior to that, she spent a dozen years at the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, where she was a prosecutor specializing in hate crimes, police excessive force, and human trafficking cases. She brought one of the largest labor trafficking cases in history, involving Guatemalan teenagers being forced to work at chicken farms in Ohio. She prosecuted multiple cases involving racially and religiously motivated violence, as well as the first-ever excessive force claims in Mississippi’s largest state prison and in the state of North Dakota. 

She also worked as a fair-housing and fair-lending lawyer in the Civil Rights Division, and briefly as a domestic-violence prosecutor at the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office. She clerked for the Hon. Michael W. McConnell on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. Before being a lawyer, she was a journalist, and she continues to write newspaper and magazine articles about legal issues. She is a graduate of Harvard Law School and Stanford University. 

Dates of advising: November 8-10

Naresh Perinpanayagam was admitted to law practice in New Zealand (’08) and New York (’20), graduated from Harvard University with an MPA (’18), and is currently an Advisor in the Office of the United Nations Secretary-General, the former Portuguese Prime Minister António Guterres. At Harvard, Naresh was awarded the Francis Bator Public Service Scholarship (merit-based full-tuition) and spent a year studying public policy at the Kennedy School. He also studied Constitutional Law, and passed the New York Bar Exam (’19). He first joined the UN Secretary-General’s office in January 2017, where his initial assignment was recruiting senior staff for the new Secretary-General. He now works in the Secretary-General’s political team with a focus on the Asia-Pacific region, where his tasks include attending the Secretary-General’s private meetings with world leaders, and reviewing the Secretary-General’s public messaging (reports, statements, speeches). Prior to moving to New York, he worked for the UN peacekeeping mission in South Sudan as a human rights investigator in civil war zones on the Congolese and Ethiopian borders, and practiced law in New Zealand. He started his career as an intern in New Zealand’s Foreign Ministry, before working as a staff member of a regional NGO in Australia (the Asia Pacific Forum of National Human Rights Institutions) and then for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva and Nepal. Born in Sri Lanka, Naresh grew up in New Zealand and attended law school at Victoria University of Wellington. He and his wife are parents of a three-year old toddler.

Dates of advising: November 3-5

Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg joined the Legal Aid Justice Center’s Immigrant Advocacy Program in 2011, and became its Legal Director in 2015. He specializes in consumer, housing, civil rights, immigration, and employment litigation in federal and state court. Simon is also LAJC’s Team Leader for consumer law. He was awarded the 2016 Legal Aid Lawyer of the Year award from the Virginia State Bar, and the 2013 LASSY award from the Virginia Poverty Law Center for greatest achievement in consumer law. Simon is a graduate of Columbia University and Yale Law School, where he was awarded the Munson prize for excellence in clinical practice.

Dates of advising: October 6-8

Jonathan Skrmetti is the chief deputy attorney general of Tennessee. In that role, he has worked as a negotiator in multi-billion-dollar settlement talks in the complex national opioid litigation, coordinated with other states to launch groundbreaking antitrust suits against the world’s largest tech platforms, and managed 160 attorneys through the challenges of the coronavirus pandemic.

Prior to joining the Attorney General’s Office, Jonathan spent nearly a decade as a federal prosecutor and five years in private practice. At the Department of Justice, Jonathan prosecuted high profile cases involving child sex traffickers, violent hate groups, and corrupt public officials. His docket included successes against neo-Nazi conspirators plotting to assassinate Barack Obama, the white supremacist murderer of a Memphis law enforcement officer, and leaders of the Aryan Alliance who firebombed a Tennessee mosque.

As a partner at Butler Snow, Jonathan focused on complex litigation, government investigations, and data security and privacy. Jonathan also taught cyberlaw as an adjunct professor at the University of Memphis.

Jonathan earned honors degrees from George Washington University, the University of Oxford, and Harvard Law School, where he served as editor-in-chief of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy. Following law school, he clerked for Judge Steven Colloton on the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.

Dates of advising: September 20-22

Will’s legal career began as a public defender in New Orleans, LA, where he witnessed the discriminatory practices removing jurors from the jury panel and took his fight from the courtroom to the community and created The Juror Project, which is his passion project. Will presents at high schools, colleges, churches and other community gatherings discussing the importance of jury service, the discriminatory practices of some prosecutors, and the factors at play removing diversity from the jury. Will completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Minnesota and earned his law degree from Seton Hall University School of Law. He currently works with the Vera Institute of Justice as the Director of the New Orleans office.