Dates of advising: Monday, September 28- Wednesday, September 30

Azalea Alemán-Bendiks is Senior Litigation Counsel for the Federal Public Defenders for the Southern District of Texas. She has worked along the Texas-Mexico border providing legal services for the poor for 24 years of her legal career. As an Assistant Federal Public Defender she defends indigent individuals charged with federal crimes. Before joining the FPD, Ms. Alemán-Bendiks was in private practice providing indigent defense at the state level with an emphasis on state criminal cases and child welfare work. Ms. Aleman-Bendiks obtained her Juris Doctorate from Harvard Law School in 1991 and a B.A. from Rice University in 1987. In addition to defending clients, Ms. Alemán-Bendiks is a speaker for continuing legal education courses on various topics including federal drug crimes, border prosecutions, legal impact of social networking, alien harboring, federal sentencing, the First Step Act and CJA counsel duties. Ms. Aleman-Bendiks is a social advocate for legal and illegal immigrants and regularly speaks to student and religious groups about border and immigration issues at the federal courthouse, churches and other forums.

Dates of advising: Monday, January 11 – Wednesday, January 13

Tori Anderson is an attorney for the House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Reform, where she works primarily on congressional investigations into the Executive Branch. Her work has included assisting with the impeachment inquiry and conducting oversight of issues related to the census, gun trafficking, and criminal justice reform. Prior to joining the Oversight Committee, Tori worked as a public defender for Metropolitan Public Defender Services in Portland, Oregon, first as a misdemeanor attorney with over 150 active misdemeanor cases then as a felony attorney with over 80 active felony cases. She worked on a variety of cases including DUIIs, assaults, trespasses, disorderly conducts, identity theft, drug possession, and murders. Tori received her B.A. from Stanford University and her J.D. from Harvard Law School.

Dates of advising: Monday, September 21 – Wednesday, September 23

Dina Bakst is Co-Founder and Co-President of A Better Balance (ABB), a national nonprofit legal advocacy organization that leverages the power of the law to advance justice for workers, so they can care for themselves and their loved ones without jeopardizing their economic security.

Since 2006, Bakst has co-led A Better Balance’s pioneering efforts to combat pregnancy and caregiver discrimination and advance fair and supportive workplace legislation such as paid sick time and paid family and medical leave in over 40 states and localities. In 2012, Bakst’s op-ed in The New York Times – “Pregnant and Pushed Out of Job” – inspired the introduction of the federal Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, legislation ABB is currently leading the fight to pass in Congress, and which Bakst recently testified on before the House Education and Labor Committee. Bakst’s work successfully enforcing pregnancy discrimination laws has been featured multiple times in The New York Times, including two front page stories, as well as other leading publications. She also played an instrumental role in the first pregnancy accommodation class action litigation against Walmart, which recently settled for $14 million dollars and benefited thousands of pregnant workers. In 2020, Bakst was named “One of 20 People and Groups Fighting For a More Equal America” by Time Magazine. In 2015, she was awarded the Edith I. Spivack Award, named for the woman who was a pioneering lawyer and role model for generations of women, for her work championing women’s rights. Bakst is also co-author of the award-winning book Babygate: How to Survive Pregnancy and Parenting in the American Workplace, a national know your rights guide for expecting and new parents covering everything from pregnancy discrimination, leave and breastfeeding rights, and workplace flexibility.

Prior to co-founding A Better Balance, Dina was an attorney with the NOW Legal Defense & Education Fund (now Legal Momentum) where she pursued litigation and policy advocacy on a wide range of women’s rights issues. Dina is a graduate of the University of Michigan Law School and Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Michigan. She also served as a labor/employment associate with Kaye, Scholer LLP. In addition to leading A Better Balance, Dina is a Board Member of Congregation Rodeph Sholom and the Hadassah Foundation. Dina also serves on the Steering Committee of Governor Cuomo’s New York State Council on Women and Girls.

Dates of advising: Thursday, November 12-Thursday, November 19

Yasmine Chubin is an international lawyer with over a decade of international criminal law (ICL), transitional justice, and rule of law experience. She has extensive experience investigating and prosecuting international criminal law cases, and developing and leading ICL capacity-building and technical assistance programs. She currently consults on various projects.

Yasmine is the Lead Expert Consultant for the International Development Law Organization’s (IDLO) Strengthening the Rwandan Judicial Institutions in International Criminal Law capacity-building and technical assistance program. She is also the Senior Legal Coordinator for the Docket, a joint project between the Sentry and the Clooney Foundation which investigates individuals and corporations alleged to be complicit in international crimes; and the Senior Legal Expert on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s atrocity prevention leadership project for global criminal justice actors, a program being developed with the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of International Narcotics Law Enforcement Affairs. She also consults for the OSACO Group through which she serves as a Lead Investigator on safeguarding, sexual exploitation and abuse, and fraud cases for various international NGOs.

Previously, Yasmine was a Trial Lawyer in the Office of the Prosecutor of both the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), and a Legal Officer to the International Co-Investigating Judge of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal (ECCC). She also worked in the Office of the Prosecutor of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). In 2018, Yasmine was appointed as a UN Expert in prosecutions and investigations for the Special Criminal Court (SCC) in the Central African Republic and helped to develop the SCC’s prosecutions and investigations strategy. Yasmine also served as the Senior Legal Adviser to the Prosecutor-General of Rwanda, advising on the first international criminal law transfer and extradition cases.

Yasmine has served as IDLO’s Lead Expert for two year-long ICL capacity-building programs in Rwanda, the first for the Rwanda Bar Association, and the second for the Rwandan Judiciary. She was also a Senior Legal Consultant for IDLO’s Rule of Law programs in Mali and the Philippines, a Senior Legal Consultant for the International Commission of Jurists’ Project on Combating Impunity for International Crimes and Gross Human Rights Violations in Tunisia, and a Sexual and Gender Based Violence Investigations Expert with the Syria Justice and Accountability Centre.

Yasmine started her legal career as an associate at Shearman & Sterling LLP’s New York office. She holds degrees from Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs and from the University of Michigan Law School, where she served as the Managing Editor of the Michigan Law Review. She is admitted to the New York bar and is fluent in English, French, and Farsi.

Dates of advising: Wednesday, October 28 – Friday, October 30

Premal Dharia is the Founder and Director of the Defender Impact Initiative, which works with public defenders, organizers and advocates around the country to end our system of mass criminalization. She has spent the last twenty years dedicated to challenging injustice in the criminal system. Premal spent nearly 15 years as a public defender in three different places: the Public Defender Service in Washington, D.C., the Office of the Federal Public Defender in Baltimore, Maryland, and the military commission at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. She has tried dozens of cases and supervised lawyers at different levels of practice. In 2014, Premal was selected for a three-month fellowship to help build out and train three new public defender offices in Palestine. Prior to launching Defender Impact Initiative, Premal brought her years of direct service to systemic work at Civil Rights Corps, where she was the Director of Litigation, overseeing national litigation and advocacy efforts aimed at changing the criminal system. Premal has spoken and written widely on systemic challenges in the criminal system, racial and carceral injustice, and the need for radical change. She is regularly on the faculty of Harvard Law School’s Trial Advocacy Workshop and the Bronx Defenders’ Defenders Academy and often speaks about litigation, advocacy and strategic approaches to change to national and local organizations, public defender offices, universities and law schools. She graduated from Brown University with a degree in History and African-American Studies and from the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

Dates of advising: Wednesday, January 6 – Friday, January 8

Donna Harati is the Director of Legal Services and Community Lawyer at Homeboy Industries. Prior to this role at Homeboy, Donna clerked for a federal judge in Ohio. During that year, she helped facilitate a class at the women’s prison in Cleveland. Donna has been actively involved in prison-related work for over a decade and taught full time at the Penitentiary of New Mexico for two years prior to law school while simultaneously serving as a crisis volunteer at the Santa Fe Rape Crisis Center. She graduated magma cum laude from Harvard Law School in 2015. Donna is committed to transformative justice based responses to harm and to imagining and working toward a world without prisons and policing.

Dates of advising: Monday, October 26 – Wednesday, October 28

Eric R. Havian is a partner in the San Francisco office of Constantine Cannon LLP. He has 25 years of experience representing whistleblowers in qui tam lawsuits. He has also represented numerous local governments in False Claims Act matters, including the County of Los Angeles and the City of San Francisco. He also represents whistleblower clients in matters before the SEC, the IRS, and other agencies.

Mr. Havian is a frequent speaker at conferences on the False Claims Act and other whistleblower programs. He was actively involved in the legislation to enact a whistleblower law for securities law violations. He also has published many articles about whistleblowing and been interviewed on numerous national news programs on the subject.

Mr. Havian previously served on the Common Cause National Governing Board and the board of California Common Cause. He is currently on the board of the Impact Fund, an organization that funds litigation involving civil rights and social justice cases, and the Regional Advisory Council for Brady United, a gun violence prevention organization.

Mr. Havian graduated cum laude in 1981 from Harvard Law School, where he was an oralist for the team that won the Ames Moot Court Competition. He was a Fellow at the Center for Law in the Public Interest from 1981 to 1983, and an Assistant United States Attorney in the Criminal Division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Francisco from 1987 through 1994. In 1994, he opened the San Francisco office of Phillips & Cohen. He joined Constantine Cannon in March 2015. Mr. Havian has taught fraud seminars at Stanford Law School and Berkeley Law School.

Dates of advising: Wednesday, October 19 – Friday, October 21

Alesdair Ittelson fights for young people who expand societal ideas of what it means to be healthy. As Director of Law & Policy at interACT: Advocates for Intersex Youth, Alesdair and his team work to protect the rights of those born with variations in their sex characteristics, also known as intersex variations. Alesdair began his career at the LGBT Rights Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center as the first ever openly transgender recipient of a Skadden Fellowship. A dedicated civil rights lawyer with over a decade of experience in legal advocacy on behalf of sex and gender-expansive individuals, Alesdair’s work on the vanguard of LGBTQI issues includes the first case challenging “conversion therapy” as consumer fraud, representation of transgender youth in educational and institutional settings throughout the Deep South, the first public case on behalf of an intersex person subjected to medically unnecessary “genital normalizing” surgery in infancy, and the first successful piece of legislation in U.S. history to name the harms of non-consensual medical interventions on intersex people. Alesdair has advised on countless policies at the state and local level and his written guidance has influenced interpretations of federal and international human rights law, including by the United States Department of Health and Human Services and the United Nations.

Dates of advising: Wednesday, October 14 – Friday, October 16

Meena is the Director of Global Programs at the Movement Law Lab. Prior to Lab, Meena co-directed the Community Justice Project, Inc., a Miami-based movement lawyering organization supporting campaigns for racial justice and human rights. She is a movement lawyer with an extensive background in activism and international human rights, including work in Haiti and Guatemala. While in Miami, Meena used her legal skills to build the power of movements locally in South Florida around workers rights, housing, gentrification and police brutality. She has also brought to bear her international human rights expertise in delegations to the United Nations to elevate U.S.-based human rights issues like police accountability in Ferguson and Miami as well as Stand Your Ground laws to the international level. It is this combination of local legal advocacy and an understanding of international human rights advocacy that Meena hopes to leverage as she develops the Global Network of Movement Lawyers at the Lab.

She deeply believes in the importance of multidisciplinarity and experimenting with new ways of solving problems. This can be anything from designing hackathons and salons to integrating arts and culture into legal work such as creating an Artist Residency Program at Community Justice Project and her collaborations with poet Aja Monet and Voices: Poetry for the People. Meena has published several articles in law journals and other media outlets, and has spoken in numerous academic and conference settings.

Meena received her J.D from the University of Washington School of Law where she was a William H. Gates Public Service Law Scholar. She also holds a Master’s degree in International Affairs (Human Rights) from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, and a B.A. in International Relations and Peace and Justice Studies from Tufts University.

Dates of advising: Wednesday, November 4 – Friday, November 6

Katherine Moss joined Southern Center for Human Rights in 2017 as a Staff Attorney in the Capital Litigation Unit. At SCHR, she represents individuals accused or convicted of death penalty offenses in Georgia and Alabama. She also serves as the director of SCHR’s internship, externship, and fellowship programs. Prior to joining SCHR, she completed two years as an E. Barrett Prettyman Fellow at Georgetown Law. There, she represented indigent clients charged with misdemeanors and felonies in D.C. Superior Court. She also supervised third-year law students in Georgetown’s criminal clinic. She earned her LL.M. in trial advocacy from Georgetown Law in 2017. Katherine earned her J.D. in 2015 from Washington and Lee University School of Law where she assisted attorneys on a federal death penalty trial through the Virginia Capital Case Clearinghouse Clinic and provided direct representation to indigent clients facing misdemeanor and felony charges through the Criminal Justice Clinic. Katherine spent her law school summers working for the Southern Center for Human Rights, Louisiana Capital Assistance Center, Gideon’s Promise, and the Alexandria, Virginia Public Defender Office. Katherine also holds a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of Southern California. She is a member of the Alabama, District of Columbia, and Georgia bars.

Dates of advising: Wednesday, October 6 – Friday, October 9

Julie Murray is a staff attorney at Planned Parenthood Federation of America, where she represents the federation and Planned Parenthood affiliates around the country in litigation to defend access to comprehensive reproductive health care, including abortion. Before joining PPFA, she was an attorney for more than seven years with Public Citizen Litigation Group, where she litigated at all levels of the federal courts in cases involving administrative and constitutional law, consumer and workers’ rights, and access to justice. She is a former fellow of the National Women’s Law Center and law clerk for the Hon. Marsha S. Berzon on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Julie is a graduate of Harvard Law School and the University of Kentucky. She currently lives in Washington, DC, with her husband–also a public interest lawyer–and her two young children.

Dates of advising: September 23, October 8, 15, and 23

Rachael Rollins is the chief law enforcement official for Boston, Chelsea, Revere, and Winthrop, Massachusetts, and oversees an office of approximately 300 people handling approximately 35,000 new cases each year. She took office in January 2019, as Suffolk County’s 16th district attorney, the first woman to be elected to that position in Suffolk County history, and the first woman of color ever to serve as a Massachusetts district attorney. She pledged to pursue that mission tirelessly by reducing incarceration, correcting racial and ethnic disparities, adopting alternatives to traditional prosecution, focusing the offices limited resources on serious and violent crimes, and improving relationships between law enforcement agencies and the communities they serve. Among her first and most impactful initiatives, District Attorney Rollins implemented a policy of presumptively dismissing and/or diverting certain low-level misdemeanor charges. These offenses are often symptomatic not of criminal intent but of mental illness, substance use disorder, and poverty. In addition, District Attorney Rollins revolutionized the way that police-involved fatalities are reviewed when she appointed an outside panel of investigators. The practice brings an unparalleled level of transparency to these investigations with the hope of increasing the public’s trust in the District Attorney’s Office and the police. Beginning in 2007, District Attorney Rollins served as an assistant United States attorney with the US Attorney’s office in Boston. In 2011, she was selected by Governor Deval Patrick’s administration as the first person of color to serve as the General Counsel of the Massachusetts Department of Transportation and was soon named the first female general counsel of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority. In 2013, she was recruited to become the Chief Legal Counsel of the Massachusetts Port Authority. She holds degrees from Northeastern University School of Law and Georgetown University Law Center.

Dates of advising: Monday, October 5 – Wednesday, October 7

Joshua Thompson is Pacific Legal Foundation’s Director of Legal Talent. His practice has covered all of PLF’s practice areas with a particular focus on Equality Before the Law. Joshua joined PLF as an attorney in 2007 after graduating cum laude from Michigan State College of Law. In law school, he was an assistant editor of the Michigan State Law Review and a member of the Trial Practice Institute. During law school Joshua clerked at the Federalist Society, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, and the Wisconsin Public Defender. He was a Charles Koch Summer Fellow in 2005. Joshua’s belief in liberty began while working in his father’s restaurant. It was furthered during his time at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he graduated with distinction with a triple major in political science, German, and international relations. Ultimately, his desire to work for a freer society was crystallized during a Fulbright year in Germany, where he read and studied as much libertarian and free market texts as he could find. Joshua married a PLF attorney in 2013. They have two young children. In his sparse free time, he plays chess (competently), guitar (poorly), and follows Wisconsin sports teams (depressingly).

Dates of advising: Wednesdsay, September 23 – Friday, September 25

Kenta Tsuda is a Staff Attorney in CLF’s Strategic Litigation and Clean Air & Water programs. He brings cases against polluters to enforce laws protecting air and water in New England and against governments when they fail in their duties to the public. Before joining CLF, Kenta served as a law clerk to the Hon. Patrick E. Higginbotham of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Kenta was previously an associate attorney with the environmental law organization Earthjustice in Alaska where he represented environmental groups and Alaska Native governments in suits against federal agencies, and with the Boies Schiller & Flexner firm in New York. He received his law degree magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review and a student fellow with the Project on the Foundations of Private Law. Before law school, Kenta was an editor at the New Left Review in London. He received an undergraduate degree from Brown University and an MPhil from Cambridge University.