Immigration Law & Resistance: Ensuring a Nation of Immigrants

Friday, October 20, 2017

Jennifer Chacón

Professor of Law, UC Irvine School of Law

Jennifer M. Chacón is Professor of Law and Senior Associate Dean for Administration at the University of California, Irvine, School of Law.  From 2012-2013, she was the Senior Associate Dean of Academic Affairs (2012-2013).
Professor Chacón is the author of a forthcoming textbook on immigration law and has written more than 50 law review articles, book chapters, expert commentaries and shorter articles and essays on immigration, criminal law, constitutional law and citizenship issues.  She is a leading expert on the intersection of criminal and immigration law and law enforcement.  Her work has been funded with grants from the Russell Sage Foundation and the National Science Foundation.  She has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School (2014-2015) and Stanford Law School (2016-2016).
She is a fellow of the American Bar Foundation (ABF), a member of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Rules Committee, a member of the AALS Executive Committee’s Section on Immigration Law, a member of the Border Criminologies Advisory Panel, and a member of the Advisory Council on the American Bar Foundation’s Future of Latinos in the U.S. project.  She is a member of the New York City Bar Association, and has assisted in pro bono projects undertaken by that Association’s Immigration and Nationality Law Committee.  She previously served on the Nominations Committee of the Law and Society Association. 
Professor Chacón was the Convenor of the Immigration Policy Advisory Committee to then-Senator Barack Obama during his 2008 presidential campaign and an outside advisor to the Immigration Transition Team of President-Elect Barack Obama from November 2008 through January 2009.
Prior to entering law teaching, Professor Chacόn was an associate at the New York law firm of Davis Polk and Wardwell from 1999-2003, and a clerk to the Honorable Sidney R. Thomas of the Ninth Circuit from 1998-1999.  Before coming to Irvine, she was a professor at the U.C. Davis School of Law, where she received tenure in 2009.  She holds a J.D. from Yale Law School (1998) and an A.B. in International Relations from Stanford University (1994).

Grace Chang

Associate Professor, UC Santa Barbara

Grace Chang is a writer and activist, joining in struggles for the rights of migrant women and women of color in the United States and transnationally.  She teaches about social science research methods and ethics; women resisting and surviving violence in all forms; and grassroots, transnational, feminist social justice organizing, including queer and disability rights, and environmental justice movements.  She is founding director of Women Of color Revolutionary Dialogues (WORD), a collective of women, queer and trans people of color building community through spoken word, political theater, music, dance and film.

Dr. Chang is completing her book, Trafficking by Any Other Name: Transnational Feminist, Immigrant and Sex Worker Rights Responses, (The New Press, forthcoming).  She is the author of Disposable Domestics:  Immigrant Women Workers in the Global Economy (South End Press, 2000 and Haymarket Books, 2016, second edition).  She co-edited the anthology Immigrant Women Workers in the Neoliberal Age, (University of Illinois Press, 2013) with Nilda Flores-Gonzalez, Anna Guevarra, and Maura Toro-Morn and the anthology Mothering:  Ideology, Experience and Agency (Routledge, 1994) with Evelyn Nakano Glenn and Linda Forcey.

Her articles include: “Inevitable Intersections: Care, Work and Citizenship,” in Disabling Domesticity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016),  “Where’s the Violence?  The Promise and Perils of Women of Color Studies,” in Presumed Incompetent (Utah, 2012) and “Reconceptualizing Approaches to Human Trafficking,” coauthored with Kathleen Kim, in the Stanford Journal of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (2007).

Howard Chang

Earle Hepburn Professor of Law, University of Pennsylvania Law School

Howard F. Chang is the Earle Hepburn Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where he has taught since 1999.  Before joining that law faculty, he was a Professor of Law at the University of Southern California Law School, where he began teaching in 1992.  He has also taught as a visiting professor at the Georgetown University Law Center from 1996 to1997, at Stanford Law School in 1998, at Harvard Law School and the New York University School of Law in 2001, at the University of Michigan Law School in 2002, and at the University of Chicago Law School in 2007.  He served as a law clerk for the Honorable Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit from 1988 to 1989.  He received his J.D. (magna cum laude) in 1987 from Harvard Law School, where he served as the Supervising Editor of the Harvard Law Review.  He received his Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1992, his Master in Public Affairs from Princeton University in 1985, and his A.B. in government from Harvard College in 1982.  He served on the Board of Directors of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California from 1995 to 1998 and on the Board of Directors of the American Law and Economics Association from 2004 to 2007.  He teaches and writes on a wide variety of subjects, including immigration law and policy.  His work includes a book, Law and Economics of Immigration, published in 2015 by Edward Elgar, as well as publications in the Yale Law Journal, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the Southern California Law Review, the Georgetown Law Journal, the Journal of Political Economy, the American Economic Review, and the RAND Journal of Economics.

Gabriel J. Chin

Edward L. Barrett Chair of Law, Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of Law, and Director of Clinical Legal Education, UC Davis School of Law

Gabriel “Jack” Chin is Edward L. Barrett Jr. Chair, Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law, and Director of Clinical Legal Education at the UC Davis School of Law.  His article Effective Assistance of Counsel and the Consequences of Guilty Pleas, 87 CORNELL L. REV. 697 (2002), co-authored with a student, was cited in the majority and concurrence in Padilla v. Kentucky, 130 S. Ct. 1473 (2010), and the majority and dissent in Chaidez v. United States, 133 S. Ct. 1103 (2013).  Justice Sotomayor cited his article The New Civil Death, 160 U. PA.  L. REV. 1789 (2012) in her dissent in Utah v. Streiff, 136 S. Ct. 2056 (2016).  He and the UC Davis APALSA persuaded the California Supreme Court to posthumously admit an attorney after he was excluded in 1890 because of his race (In re Hong Yen Chang, 334 P.3d 288 (Cal. 2015)).  He is a graduate of Wesleyan and the Michigan and Yale law schools.

Alina Das

Professor of Clinical Law, NYU School of Law

Alina Das ’05 is a Professor of Clinical Law at NYU School of Law, where she co-teaches and co-directs the Immigrant Rights Clinic.  She and her clinic students represent immigrants and community organizations in litigation and advocacy to advance immigrant rights locally and across the country.  In addition to her teaching, Das engages in scholarship on deportation and detention issues, particularly at the intersection of immigration and criminal law.  Das also serves as faculty director of the NYU Latinx Rights Scholars Program.  Prior to joining the Law School, Das was a Soros Justice Fellow and staff attorney with the Immigrant Defense Project, and clerked for Judge Kermit V. Lipez of the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.  Das graduated magna cum laude with an AB in government from Harvard University, and graduated cum laude from NYU Law as a Root-Tilden-Kern Scholar with a joint MPA from NYU’s Wagner School of Public Service.  Das is a recipient of the LexisNexis Matthew Bender Daniel Levy Memorial Award for Outstanding Achievement in Immigration Law, the NYU Law Podell Distinguished Teaching Award, the NYU Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Faculty Award, the NYU Center for Multicultural Education & Programs Nia Faculty Award, and the NYU Women of Color Collective Woman of Distinction Award.

César García Hernández

Assistant Professor, University of Denver – Sturm College of Law

César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández is a tenured associate professor of law at the University of Denver.  He has been publishing crimmigration.com since 2009.  César’s academic interests center on crimmigration law, including teaching a seminar on the topic and having published articles about the right to counsel for immigrants in the criminal justice system, immigration imprisonment, and race-based immigration policing in the California Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Boston University Law Review, BYU Law Review, Maryland Law Review, and Georgetown Immigration Law Journal, among others.  His book, Crimmigration Law, was published by the American Bar Association in 2015.  In addition to teaching a crimmigration seminar, he teaches Immigration Law, Criminal Procedure, and Torts.
César makes frequent public appearances discussing crimmigration law.  He regularly speaks to groups of lawyers and has presented his academic research on approximately 70 occasions since 2010.  He has also been quoted in the Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio, Public Radio International, International Business Times, San Antonio Express-News, U.S. Law Week, The Nation, La Opinión, several local media outlets, and more.
In 2014, he received the Derrick A. Bell, Jr. Award from the Association of American Law Schools Section on Minority Groups, an honor issued to a “junior faculty member who, through activism, mentoring, colleagueship, teaching and scholarship, has made an extraordinary contribution to legal education, the legal system or social justice.” In 2016, he was a scholar-in-residence at the University of California, Berkeley and Texas Southern University.  In 2018, he will serve as a Fulbright scholar in Slovenia where he will study immigration imprisonment in Central Europe.
Born and raised in McAllen, Texas, César is a graduate of Brown University and Boston College Law School.  He is Of Counsel to García & García Attorneys at Law, P.L.L.C.

Pratheepan Gulasekaram

Professor of Law, Santa Clara Law

Professor Gulasekaram teaches Constitutional Law and Immigration Law.  His research currently focuses on the political and legal dynamics of state and local immigration regulations, and their effect on federal policies.  His co-authored book, The New Immigration Federalism, provides an in-depth empirical and theoretical analysis of the recent resurgence of state and local immigration lawmaking.  He has also extensively explored the relationship between the Second Amendment and immigrants, as a way of understanding constitutional protections for noncitizens.  In addition to his scholarly publications, his commentary has appeared in the L.A. Times and the Washington Post, and in blogs for various national outlets.  He is a graduate of Brown University and Stanford Law School.
Professor Gulasekaram joined the Santa Clara University School of Law faculty in 2007, and has also taught as Visiting Assistant Professor at Stanford Law School, Acting Assistant Professor of Lawyering at New York University School of Law and Visiting Assistant Professor at Loyola University Law School in New Orleans.  Prior to academia, he was a litigation associate with O’Melveny & Meyers LLP and Susman Godfrey LLP, both in Los Angeles.  He clerked for the Honorable Jacques L. Wiener Jr. on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans.  In addition, he is the co-founder of the World Children’s Initiative, Inc., a non-profit organization dedicated to improving health and educational infrastructure for children in developing areas around the world.

Annie Laurie Hines

Graduate Student, UC Davis, Department of Economics

Annie Laurie Hines is a graduate student at U.C. Davis specializing in labor and public economics with a focus on immigration, education, and poverty.

Bill Hing

Professor, Director of the Immigration and Deportation Defense Clinic, and Dean's Circle Scholar, University of San Francisco School of Law

Bill Ong Hing is a Professor of Law and Migration Studies at the University of San Francisco and Professor of Law Emeritus, University of California, Davis.  He teaches Immigration Policy, Introduction to Migration Studies and Theory, Rebellious Lawyering, Evidence, and directs the USF Immigration and Deportation Defense Clinic.  Throughout his career, he has pursued social justice by combining community work, litigation, and scholarship.  His books include Ethical Borders—NAFTA, Globalization and Mexican Migration (Temple Univ. Press 2010); Deporting Our Souls—Values, Morality, and Immigration Policy (Cambridge Univ. Pres 2006), Defining America Through Immigration Policy (Temple Univ. Press 2004), To Be an American: Cultural Pluralism and the Rhetoric of Assimilation (New York Univ. Press 1997), Making and Remaking Asian America Through Immigration Policy (Stanford Univ. Press 1993).  He was co-counsel in the precedent-setting U.S. Supreme Court asylum case, INS v. Cardoza-Fonseca (1987).  Professor Hing is the founder of the Immigrant Legal Resource Center in San Francisco and is a member of the San Francisco Police Commission.

Kevin Johnson

Dean and Mabie-Apallas Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o Studies, UC Davis School of Law

Kevin R. Johnson is Dean, Mabie-Apallas Professor of Public Interest Law, and Professor of Chicana/o Studies.  He joined the UC Davis law faculty in 1989 and was named Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in 1998.  Johnson became Dean in 2008.  He has taught a wide array of classes, including immigration law, civil procedure, complex litigation, Latinos and Latinas and the law, and Critical Race Theory.  In 1993, he was the recipient of the law school's Distinguished Teaching Award.
Dean Johnson has published extensively on immigration law and civil rights.  Published in 1999, his book How Did You Get to Be Mexican?  A White/Brown Man's Search for Identity was nominated for the 2000 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award.  Dean Johnson’s latest book, Immigration Law and the US-Mexico Border (2011), received the Latino Literacy Now’s International Latino Book Awards – Best Reference Book.  Dean Johnson blogs at ImmigrationProf, and is a regular contributor on immigration on SCOTUSblog.
A regular participant in national and international conferences, Dean Johnson has also held leadership positions in the Association of American Law Schools and is the recipient of an array of honors and awards.  He is quoted regularly by the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and other national and international news outlets.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School, where he served as an editor of the Harvard Law Review, Dean Johnson earned an A.B. in economics from UC Berkeley, graduating Phi Beta Kappa.  After law school, he clerked for the Honorable Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and worked as an attorney at the international law firm of Heller Ehrman White & McAuliffe.  Dean Johnson has served on the board of directors of Legal Services of Northern California since 1996 and currently is President of the board.  From 2006-11, he served on the board of directors of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the leading Mexican-American civil rights organization in the United States.
Dean Johnson is the recipient of many awards and honors, including the Association of American Law Schools Minority Groups Section Clyde Ferguson Award (2004), the Hispanic National Bar Association Law Professor of the Year award (2006), the National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies Scholar of the Year award (2008), the Central American Resource Center (CARECEN) Romero Vive Award (2012), and the Centro Legal de la Raza Outstanding Achievements in the Law Award (2015).  In 2003, he was elected to the American Law Institute.

Michael Kagan

Director of the Immigration Clinic, Professor of Law, University of Nevada Las Vegas – William S. Boyd School of Law

Michael Kagan directs the Immigration Clinic and teaches administrative law, professional responsibility, international human rights and immigration law.  In both his research and his clinical teaching, Professor Kagan focuses on the tension between immigration law and civil rights.
Professor Kagan’s scholarship has been published by Georgetown Law Journal, Northwestern University Law Review, Washington University Law Review, Boston College Law Review, Ohio State Law Journal, and in online editions of California Law Review and Michigan Law Review, among others.  He wrote several of the most widely cited articles in the fields of international refugee and asylum law, which have been relied on by courts in multiple countries.  Professor Kagan’s research on credibility assessment in asylum cases “guided most subsequent research and analysis on the topic,” according to a 2012 commentary.  He is frequently interviewed on immigration issues by local, national and global news media, and is a frequent Op-Ed writer, with his work appearing in The Washington Post, Salon.com, The Daily Beast, World Politics Review, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Under Professor Kagan’s direction, the Immigration Clinic trains student attorneys to represent people in complex deportation cases, innovates new ways to offer legal advice and representation to underserved people in immigration proceedings, and seeks to be a catalyst to expand legal services for the most at risk indigent immigrants in Nevada.  In addition to defending immigrants against deportation, Professor Kagan consults with the Clark County Public Defender on immigration considerations for non-citizen defendants in criminal cases.
Before coming to Boyd, Professor Kagan spent 10 years building legal aid programs for refugees throughout the Middle East and Asia, and lived in London, Cairo, Beirut and Jerusalem.  He held teaching positions at Tel Aviv University and the American University in Cairo.  His role in expanding refugee legal aid in the global south was profiled in Zachary Kaufman’s Social Entrepreneurship in the Age of Atrocities (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2012).

Hiroshi Motomura

Susan Westerberg Prager Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law

Hiroshi Motomura is the Susan Westerberg Prager Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law and a teacher and scholar of immigration and citizenship, with influence across a range of academic disciplines and in federal, state, and local policymaking.  His book, Americans in Waiting: The Lost Story of Immigration and Citizenship in the United States (Oxford 2006) won the Professional and Scholarly Publishing (PROSE) Award from the Association of American Publishers as the year’s best book in Law and Legal Studies, and was chosen by the U.S. Department of State for its Suggested Reading List for Foreign Service Officers.  He is a co-author of two immigration-related casebooks: Immigration and Citizenship: Process and Policy (8th ed. West 2016), and Forced Migration: Law and Policy (2d ed. West 2013), and he has published many widely cited articles on immigration and citizenship.  His most recent book, Immigration Outside the Law (Oxford 2014), won the Association of American Publishers' Law and Legal Studies 2015 PROSE Award and was chosen by the Association of College and Research Libraries as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title.  He has been recognized for his advocacy for immigrants, most recently by the National Lawyers Guild Los Angeles Chapter in 2016, and he serves as Vice Chair of the Board of Directors of the National Immigration Law Center.  He has received multiple teaching honors, including the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award in 2014 and the 2013 Chris Kando Iijima Teacher and Mentor Award from the Conference of Asian Pacific American Law Faculty, and he was one of 26 law professors nationwide profiled in What the Best Law Teachers Do (Harvard 2013).  In 2017, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to pursue his current scholarly project, a new book with the working title, Migrants, Refugees, and Citizens.

Giovanni Peri

Professor and Department Chair, UC Davis, Department of Economics

Giovanni Peri is Professor of Economics and Chair of the Economics Department at the University of California, Davis and Director of the Migration Research Cluster at UC Davis.  He is also Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  His research focuses on the economic determinants and consequences of international migrations.
He holds a PhD in Economics from UC Berkeley and a Doctorate in Economics and Statistics from Bocconi University, Milano.
He has published extensively in Academic Journals and books about the economic determinants and effects of human migrations He has received grants from the Mac Arthur Foundation, the Russel Sage Foundation, the World Bank, the National Science Foundation and several other foundations and institutions.
His research is often featured on the Economist, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, NPR news and other popular newspapers, news programs and Blogs.  His research was extensively used as background of the US senate immigration reform proposal in 2013 under the Obama Administration.

Rachel Ray

Managing Attorney, UC Immigrant Legal Services Center

Rachel Ray is a Managing Attorney at the UC Immigrant Legal Services Center, which provides immigration legal services to University of California students and their immediate family members.  She is a graduate of UC Davis School of Law (J.D., Public Service Law Program Scholar) and Whitman College.  Her immigration legal experience includes removal defense, family and humanitarian based work, and business immigration cases at nonprofit organizations and private firms including the Law Offices of Daniel Shanfield—Immigration Defense, PC and Fragomen, Del Rey, Bernsen & Loewy.  Most recently, Rachel served as the as the lead attorney for the UC Davis Immigration Law Clinic’s Unaccompanied Minors Project, representing minors in removal proceedings.  She has also worked as a volunteer immigration attorney with Community Legal Services in East Palo Alto, as a Civil Rights Impact Litigation Attorney Fellow with the Law Foundation of Silicon Valley, and as a community organizer and documentarian for the ACLU of Northern California on a special immigrants' rights project in Alabama.  In 2011, Rachel authored “Insecure Communities: Examining Local Government Participation in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s ‘Secure Communities’ Program,” published by the Seattle Journal for Social Justice.  Rachel has served on several boards, including the AILA Santa Clara Valley Chapter, Somos Mayfair, and the Santa Clara Valley and Yolo County Chapters of the ACLU.

Leticia Saucedo

Professor of Law, UC Davis School of Law

Leticia Saucedo is an expert in employment, labor, and immigration law.  She taught Torts and Immigration Law and co-directed the Immigration Law Clinic at the Wm. S. Boyd School of Law, University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) until 2010.  She has developed courses in international and domestic service learning that explore the immigration consequences of crime and domestic violence in a post-conflict society.
Saucedo earned her AB, cum laude, from Bryn Mawr College in 1984 and her JD, cum laude, in 1996 from Harvard Law School, where she was managing editor of the Harvard Latino Law Review.  After law school, she served as briefing attorney to Chief Justice Thomas Phillips of the Texas Supreme Court.  She then became an associate at Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver, and Jacobson in New York City, where she was the recipient of the Fried Frank MALDEF Fellowship.  From 1999 to 2003, she worked as a staff attorney for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund in San Antonio, Texas, where she litigated employment and education cases.
Saucedo's research interests lie at the intersections of employment, labor, and immigration law.  Her law review articles have appeared in Notre Dame Law Review, the Ohio State Law Journal, the Buffalo Law Review, the Richmond Law Review, the Harvard Journal of Law and Gender, the Harvard Latino Law Review, the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform, and the Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences.  She is a member of the American Law Institute.

Jayashri Srikantiah

Professor of Law, Director of the Immigrants' Rights Clinic, Stanford Law School

An experienced clinical teacher and litigator, Jayashri Srikantiah is the founding director of the law school’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic.  Under her direction, students in the clinic have represented scores of immigrants facing deportation, including asylum-seekers, immigrants with prior criminal convictions, immigrant survivors of crime and undocumented migrants with longstanding ties to the United States.  Professor Srikantiah and clinic students have litigated cases in the immigration courts, the federal district courts, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court.  Professor Srikantiah’s litigation successes include challenging the federal government’s immigration detention practices, uncovering the federal government’s use of processes to deport individuals without hearings, and limiting the immigration consequences of prior criminal convictions.  In recognition of her work on behalf of immigrants’ rights, California Lawyer magazine named Professor Srikantiah one of its 2014 Attorneys of the Year.
Professor Srikantiah’s research and scholarly work explores the role of administrative discretion in immigration decision-making in various areas, including human trafficking and immigration detention; and the pedagogy of law clinics that combine direct services work with impact litigation and advocacy.  Her current research concentrates on developing teaching methods for clinics representing institutional clients, immigration detention and the immigration consequences of crimes.
Before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 2004, Professor Srikantiah was the associate legal director of the ACLU of Northern California and a staff attorney at the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project.  Professor Srikantiah has also worked as an associate at the law firm of Howard Rice Nemerovski Canady Falk & Rabkin and was a law clerk to Judge David R. Thompson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Juliet Stumpf

Robert E. Jones Professor of Advocacy and Ethics, Lewis & Clark Law School

Juliet Stumpf is the Robert E. Jones Professor of Advocacy and Ethics at Lewis & Clark Law School.  She is a scholar of crimmigration law, the intersection of immigration and criminal law.  Her current research explores innovation in immigration law, and seeks to illuminate the study of immigration law with interdisciplinary insights.  She is a co-author of Immigration and Citizenship: Process and Policy (8th ed. West 2016), and will co-author the third edition of Forced Migration: Law and Policy (West).  Stumpf is a co-founder of CINETS, a transnational, interdisciplinary network of crimmigration scholars.  She sits on the Advisory Group of Oxford University’s academic blog Border Criminologies and the Board of Directors of the Innovation Law Lab.  She received the 2016 Leo Levenson Award for Excellence in Teaching at Lewis & Clark Law School.  She taught Lawyering at NYU School of Law, clerked for Judge Richard A. Paez on the Ninth Circuit, and served as a civil rights attorney in the U.S. Justice Department.  Key publications include D(e)volving Discretion: Lessons from the Life and Times of Secure Communities, 64 Am. U. L. Rev. 1259 (2015); Doing Time: Crimmigration Law and the Perils of Haste, 58 UCLA L. Rev. 1705 (2011); States of Confusion: the Rise of State and Local Power over Immigration, 86 N.C. L. Rev. 1557 (2008); and The Crimmigration Crisis: Immigrants, Crime, and Sovereign Power, 56 Am. U. L. Rev. 367 (2006).  She received a J.D. cum laude from the Georgetown University Law Center and a B.A. in English Literature from Oberlin College.

Keynote

The Honorable Paul C. Lo

Superior Court of California, County of Merced

Judge Paul C. Lo is the first Hmong-American to be appointed judge in American history.

Video Message

Janet Napolitano

President, University of California

President Napolitano leads a university system with 10 campuses, five medical centers, three affiliated national laboratories, and a statewide agriculture and natural resources program.

Napolitano is a distinguished public servant with a record of leading large, complex organizations at the federal and state levels.

She served as Secretary of Homeland Security from 2009-13, as Governor of Arizona from 2003-09, as Attorney General of Arizona from 1998-2003, and as U.S. Attorney for the District of Arizona from 1993-97. Before that, she practiced at the law firm of Lewis & Roca in Phoenix, where she became a partner in 1989. She began her career in 1983 as a clerk for Judge Mary M. Schroeder of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

As Governor of Arizona, Napolitano focused on education, from pre-kindergarten through public higher education. She was the first woman to chair the National Governors Association, and was named one of the nation’s top five governors by Time magazine.

Napolitano earned a B.S. degree (summa cum laude in Political Science) in 1979 from Santa Clara University, where she was Phi Beta Kappa, a Truman Scholar and the university’s first female valedictorian. She received her law degree in 1983 from the University of Virginia School of Law. Napolitano holds honorary degrees from several universities and colleges, including Emory University, Pomona College and Northeastern University. In 2010, she was awarded the prestigious Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal (Law), the University of Virginia’s highest external honor.

Moderators

Ashutosh Bhagwat

Martin Luther King, Jr. 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.  In 2003, he was awarded the Rutter Award for Teaching Excellence at UC Hastings. Bhagwat is a member of the American Law Institute.

Rose Cuison Villazor

Professor of Law, UC Davis School of Law

Professor Rose Cuison Villazor is Professor of Law and Martin Luther King, Jr. Hall Research Scholar at UC Davis School of Law.

Professor Villazor teaches, researchers and writes in the areas of immigration and citizenship law, property law, Asian Americans and the law, equal protection law and critical race theory.  Her published or soon-to-be-published law review articles include, “Interstitial Citizenship,” in the Fordham Law Review (2017), “The Undocumented Closet,” in the North Carolina Law Review (2013), “The Other Loving: Uncovering the Federal Regulation of Interracial Marriages,” in the New York University Law Review (2011), “Rediscovering Oyama v. California: At the Intersection of Property, Race and Citizenship,” in the Washington University Law Review (2010), and "Blood Quantum Land Laws: The Race versus Political Identity Dilemma," in the California Law Review (2008).   She has also been published in the Southern California Law Review, University of California at Davis Law Review, Southern Methodist University Law Review, Wayne State Law Review and other journals.  In the spring of 2014, Professor Villazor served as a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley School of Law’s Center for the Study of Law and Society.  In the fall of 2015, she will be a Visiting Professor at Columbia Law School.

She is co-editor with Gabriel “Jack” Chin of Legislating a New America, which focuses on the 50th anniversary of the 1965 Immigration Act and published by Cambridge University Press in December 2015.  She is also co-editor of a forthcoming book, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and the Law, with Neil Gotanda and Robert Chang, which will be published by New York University Press in 2017.  In 2012, she co-edited an anthology with Kevin Maillard, “Loving v. Virginia in a Post-Racial World: Rethinking Race, Sex, and Marriage,” which was published by Cambridge University Press.

Professor Villazor received the 2011 Derrick A. Bell Award, which is given by the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Minority Section to a junior faculty member who, through activism, mentoring, teaching and scholarship, has made an extraordinary contribution to legal education, the legal system, or social justice. 

Professor Villazor obtained an LL.M from Columbia Law School in 2006 and a J.D. from the American University Washington College of Law in 2000.  While in law school, she served as Notes and Comment Editor of the American University Law Review.  After graduating from law school, she clerked for Associate Judge Stephen H. Glickman on the District of Columbia Court of Appeals.  She then received an Equal Justice Works Fellowship to work for New York Lawyers for the Public Interest from 2001 to 2004.   She served as a Human Rights Fellow at Columbia Law School from 2004 until 2006 where she focused on the domestic application of international human rights.  While pursuing her LL.M at Columbia, she was selected as a LatCrit Student Scholar.

Prior to teaching at UC Davis School of Law, Professor Villazor taught at Hofstra University School of Law and Southern Methodist University (SMU) Dedman School of Law.

Floyd F. Feeney

Homer G. and Ann Berryhill Professor of Law for International Legal and Communication Studies, UC Davis School of Law

Floyd Feeney is the Homer and Ann Berryhill Angelo Professor of Law and Director of the LL.M. Program. He is a graduate of Davidson College (B.S. History, 1955) and the New York University School of Law (J.D., 1960). At Davidson, he served as President of the Student Body. At the NYU Law School he was a Root-Tilden Scholar, editor-in-chief of the law review, and received the Sommer Award as outstanding graduate for 1960.

A former law clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black (1961 Term), he served as Deputy Special Counsel for the President's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity (1962-63), Special Assistant to the Administrator of the Agency for International Development (1963-1966), and Assistant Director, President's Crime Commission (1966-67).

He came to UC Davis in 1968 as Professor of Law. From 1968 until 1986, he also served as Executive Director of the Center on Administration of Criminal Justice. During 1983-84, he was Director of the London Office of the Vera Institute of Justice.

The author of seven books and numerous articles, he has received awards from the National Institute of Justice and the California Probation, Parole, and Correctional Association. A Fulbright scholar at the University of Augsburg (Germany) in 1995-96, he has taught and lectured in China, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, and the United Kingdom. His consulting and evaluation projects include work for the National Institute of Justice, the National Center for State Courts, the British Home Office, the California Legislature, the American Bar Association's European and Eurasian Law Initiative, the Police Foundation and numerous individual criminal justice agencies. In 2000-2001 he served as legal advisor to the Speaker's Commission on the California Initiative Process. Feeney is a member of the American Law Institute.

Shayak Sarkar

Acting Professor of Law, UC Davis School of Law

Shayak Sarkar's scholarship addresses the structure and legal regulation of inequality. His substantive interests lie in financial regulation, employment law, immigration, and taxation. He is currently finishing his Ph.D. in economics at Harvard and will join the UC Davis School of Law faculty in Spring 2018.

Professor Sarkar clerked for the Hon. Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Prior to his clerkship, he practiced as an employment attorney at Greater Boston Legal Services, where he focused on domestic workers’ rights. He received his J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was active in the Iraqi Refugee Assistance Project and the Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic. He also served as a Coker Fellow in Contracts and received the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans. Before law school he studied as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, where he earned masters degrees, with distinction, in social work and development economics.

His research has appeared in the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, the Harvard Journal of Law and Gender, the Yale Journal on Regulation, and edited volumes. 

Brian Soucek

Acting Professor of Law, UC Davis School of Law

Brian Soucek is a graduate of Boston College (B.A., Philosophy and Economics); Columbia University (Ph.D., Philosophy), where he was awarded the Core Preceptor Prize for his teaching; and Yale Law School (J.D.), where he was Comments Editor for the Yale Law Journal, a Coker Fellow in Procedure and won the Munson Prize for his work in the school’s immigration clinic. Prior to law school, Soucek taught for three years in the Humanities Collegiate Division and Philosophy Department at the University of Chicago, where he was Collegiate Assistant Professor and Co-Chair of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts. After law school, he clerked for the late Mark R. Kravitz, United States District Judge for the District of Connecticut, and the Hon. Guido Calabresi of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.

Professor Soucek’s articles have been cited by the Sixth and Seventh Circuits, referenced and excerpted in leading casebooks in Immigration Law and Sexual Orientation Law, discussed by the Wall Street Journal, and honored with the Dukeminier Award from UCLA’s Williams Institute for the year’s best article on sexual orientation and gender identity law. Professor’s Soucek’s published work spans from refugee/asylum law to constitutional and statutory antidiscrimination law to a recent set of projects on law’s aesthetic judgments. Since coming to UC Davis School of Law in Fall 2013, Professor Soucek has taught Constitutional Law II: Equal Protection and the First Amendment; Civil Procedure; Antidiscrimination Law; Asylum and Refugee Law; and an undergraduate First Year Seminar on Free Expression.