Participant’s Biographies
Chandra Bhatnagar is a Staff Attorney with the Human Rights Program (HRP), where he leads HRP’s domestic and international advocacy around Hurricane Katrina, affirmative action, and juvenile justice issues, and is engaged in federal court litigation and litigation in international tribunals involving the rights of low-wage immigrant workers, undocumented workers, and guest-workers. Prior to joining the ACLU, Bhatnagar was a Skadden Fellow and Staff Attorney with the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, where he directed the South Asian Workers’ Project for Human Rights, a community-based project providing legal services to low-wage workers from South Asia.
Bhatnagar has also worked internationally, partnering with a leading NGO in India in applying human rights standards to their anti-child labor/bonded labor campaigns, and domestically with the Center for Constitutional Rights, where he did immigrants’ rights and anti-police brutality organizing, and served as the interim director of the Ella Baker Summer Intern Program. He received a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and an LL.M. in international human rights from Columbia Law School.
Pauline Brooks
Professor Paul Butler teaches law at George Washington University Law School. He received his B.A. from Yale University, graduating cum laude; and his J.D. from Harvard Law School, also graduating cum laude.
Professor Butler teaches in the areas of criminal law, race relations law, and jurisprudence. His scholarship has been published in many leading scholarly journals, including the Yale Law Journal, the Harvard Law Review, the Stanford Law Review and the UCLA Law Review. His work has been profiled on 60 Minutes, Nightline, and the ABC, CBS and NBC Evening News, among other places. He lectures regularly for the American Bar Association and the NAACP, and at colleges, law schools, and community organizations throughout the United States.
Prof. Butler served as a federal prosecutor with the U.S. Department of Justice, where his specialty was public corruption. Prof. Butler was awarded the Soros Justice Fellowship for 2006-7. He will write a book about the future of criminal justice.
Professor Devon Carbado teaches law at UCLA School of Law. Professor Carbado writes in the areas of critical race theory, employment discrimination, criminal procedure, constitutional law, and identity. He is a former director of the Critical Race Studies Program at UCLA Law. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 1994. At Harvard, he was the Editor-in-Chief of The Harvard Black Letter Law Journal, a member of the Board of Student Advisors, and winner of the Northeast Frederick Douglass Moot Court Competition.
Professor Sumi Cho employs a critical race feminist approach to her work on affirmative action, sexual harassment, legal history, and civil rights. She was the principal investigator for a Civil Liberties Public Education Fund grant on the first coordinated legal research on Japanese American interment, redress, and reparations. The AALS Minority Groups section honored her with the first Junior Faculty Award. Prof. Cho has served as a visiting professor at the University of Michigan and University of Iowa law schools. She currently serves on the Board of Directors for LatCrit. Professor Cho holds a J.D. and a Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California at Berkeley.
Professor Kimberle Crenshaw is the Executive Director of the African American Policy Forum: Crenshaw and professor of law at UCLA’s and at Columbia’s law school. She writes in the area of Civil Rights, Black feminist legal theory, race, and racism and the law. Her articles have appeared in such journals as the Harvard Law Review, National Black Law Journal and Stanford Law Review. She is the founding coordinator of the Critical Race Theory Workshop, and the co-editor of a volume, Critical Race Theory: Key Documents That Shaped the Movement. Prof. Crenshaw has lectured nationally and internationally on race matters, addressing audiences throughout Europe, Africa and South America. In 1996 she co-founded the African American Policy Forum (AAPF) to highlight the centrality of gender in racial justice discourses. Prof. Crenshaw earned her J.D. at Harvard; L.L.M. at University of Wisconsin and B.A. at Cornell University.
Laura Flanders is the host of "RadioNation" heard on Air America Radio and the author most recently of Blue Grit: Making Impossible, Improbable and Inspirational Change in America (Penguin Books, 2008). Flanders was the founding director of the Women’s Desk at the media watch group, FAIR and the founding host of Your Call, heard on KALW in San Francisco. She’s a frequent contributor to the Nation magazine and regular panelist on CNN. Her 2004 book, BUSHWOMEN; Tales of a Cynical Species was a New York Times best-seller.
Professor Cheryl I. Harris teaches Constitutional Law, Civil Rights, Employment Discrimination and Critical Race Theory at UCLA School of Law. As the National Co-Chair for the National Conference of Black Lawyers for several years, she developed expertise in international human rights, particularly concerning South Africa. Professor Harris was a key organizer of several major conferences both in South Africa and in the United States that helped establish a dialogue between U.S. legal scholars and South African lawyers during the development of South Africa’s first democratic constitution in 1994.
She is the author of leading works in Critical Race Theory including the highly influential Whiteness as Property (Harv. L. Rev.). Her work has also taken up the relationship among race, gender and property and most recently has focused on race, equality and the Constitution through the re-examination of Plessy v. Ferguson and Grutter v. Bollinger.
In 2002 Professor Harris received a fellowship from the Mellon Foundation to co-host a semester long interdisciplinary working group and conference series on "Redress in Social Thought, Law and Literature," at the University of California Humanities Research Institute.
Professor Luke Harris is the Program Director of the African American Policy Forum and teaches American Politics and Constitutional Law at Vassar College. Professor Harris co-founded the African American Policy Forum (AAPF) as part of an ongoing effort to promote women’s rights in the context of struggles for racial justice. Prof. Harris earned a B.A. at Saint Joseph’s University, a J.D. and an LL.M at Yale Law School, and a Ph.D. in Politics at Princeton. An expert in the field of Critical Race Theory, Prof. Harris has authored a series of important essays on questions of racial and gender equality in contemporary America; and was the co-writer and chief consultant for Kathe Sandler’s 1993 award-winning documentary film, A Question of Color. More recently, his ground breaking essay, Affirmative Action as Equalizing Opportunity: Challenging the Myth of Preferential Treatment, co-authored with Uma Narayan, was republished in Hugh LaFollette’s, Ethics in Practice, in 2006.
Camila Morsch is the Associate Director for the African American Policy Forum. Originally from Brazil, Camila attended Law School (1999-2004) and graduated with excellent academic record. Camila has been in the U.S. since 2004, where she has been awarded several scholarships and grants. Camila holds a Masters degree in International Politics (Marshall University 2006) and an L.L.M. in International Law and Comparative Studies (UCLA School of Law 2007). She started her career as an intern coordinator at the State Public Ministry in Brazil, where she worked for 2 years. After accepting a Graduate Assistantship from Marshall University – WV. Recently, she traveled with the Columbia law school students in the GAAPP project to India as the project coordinator where she was able to visit the Navsarjan Trust Foundation in Gujarat.
Furaha Norton is an editor at the New Press, where she acquires works in African American Studies, history, politics/current affairs, psychology and sociology. Furaha received her PhD from Cornell University in 2002, where she studied African American literature; postcolonial theory; Toni Morrison; George Eliot; and feminism and postcoloniality in Ireland. She began her editorial career in 2001 as assistant to the editorial director of the trade division of Oxford University Press; and she has also worked as a paperback editor at Vintage/Anchor. While at Oxford Furaha acquired and edited several books including Scott Nelson’s Steel Drivin’ Man: John Henry and the Birth of an American Legend, which won the 2006 Merle Curti Prize, the 2006 Anisfield-Wolf Prize, and the 2007 National Arts Council Writing Award. She also acquired Paul Collier’s The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What We Can Do About It, which was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and also received the 2007 Lionel Gelber Prize for Best Book in International Affairs.
Sunita Patel is a Staff Attorney and Soros Justice Fellow at The Legal Aid Society, Immigration Law Unit in New York working to implement systems of immigration detention transparency and community accountability and representing detained non-citizens in removal proceedings due to criminal convictions. Prior to her fellowship, Sunita clerked for the Hon. Judge Ivan L. R. Lemelle, Eastern District of Louisiana.
She obtained her BA at Tulane University and her JD from American University Washington College of Law, where she founded the Immigrant Rights Coalition. As a law student, she was a student attorney in the Human Rights Law Clinic and interned with Senator Ted Kennedy’s office of the Judiciary Committee. She has also clerked with civil rights and immigrant rights organizations such as the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Legal Aid Society of Manhattan, and the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund. Sunita has volunteered internationally for the Self Employed Women’s Association in Gujarat, India and development organizations in Durban, South Africa.
Professor Russell Robinson is an Acting Professor at UCLA School of Law. Robinson graduated with honors from Harvard Law School (1998), after receiving his B.A. summa cum laude from Hampton University (1995). Robinson clerked for Judge Dorothy Nelson of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (1998-99) and for Justice Stephen Breyer of the U.S. Supreme Court (2000-01). He has also worked for the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Legal Counsel (1999-2000).
Robinson’s current scholarly and teaching interests include antidiscrimination law, law and psychology, race and sexuality, and media and entertainment law. His publications include: Casting and Caste-ing: Reconciling Artistic Freedom and Antidiscrimination Norms, 95 Cal L. Rev. 1 (2007); Uncovering Covering, 101 Nw. U. L. Rev. 1809 (2007); Perceptual Segregation, 108 Colum. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming summer 2008); Structural Dimensions of Romantic Preferences, 76 Fordham L. Rev. __ (forthcoming 2008). He is also working on an article entitled Masculinity as Prison.
Alvin Louis Starks created the Open Society Institute’s Racial Justice Initiative program within the U.S. Justice Fund to increase the visibility and support of race-conscious remedies to advance progressive activism in the 21st century. The program explicitly supports innovative social justice organizations and initiatives that defend and secure social and civil opportunities for historically marginalized communities of color. Building upon the legacy of traditional civil rights advocacy, the program focuses on dismantling the structural and systemic barriers that perpetuate racial and class exclusion in our evolving democracy. Recently, he recently joined the Arcus Foundation as the Senior Program Officer for Racial Justice, Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity. His resulting work will focus on achieving social justice reform that is inclusive of race, gender and sexual orientation by addressing the root ideological and social conditions that deny equity, opportunity and acceptance.
Alvin serves as an advocate within the philanthropic community to advance more appreciation for advancing innovative racial justice funding and has presented on the intersection of race to secure progressive reform in society.
He lives in Brooklyn.
