Who We Are:
Gender and Law Faculty and Staff

WCL staff and faculty members have a wealth of knowledge and experience in gender and law. Many faculty members and programs employ upper-level students as research assistants. Also, seminars taught by faculty members who research and write in gender and law topics are excellent venues for writing papers that fulfill the upper-level writing requirement. The faculty and staff members listed below are only a few of the key members of the WCL gender and law community.

Pamela Bridgewater:

Pamela Bridgewater is a reproductive rights advocate and activist. She specializes in feminist legal theory and reproductive rights and technology. Her areas of teaching include Property, Reproductive Rights, and Property Interests in People. Her book, Breeding a Nation: Slavery and the Pursuit of Reproductive Freedom was published by South End Press in the Spring 2007.

Susan Carle:

Susan Carle has a particular interest in the history and sociology of gender, race, class and socioeconomic status in the legal profession. She teaches Torts, Employment Discrimination and Legal Ethics. She has published in the areas of sex harassment law and early female public interest lawyers. Professor Carle recently published Lawyers' Ethics and the Pursuit of Social Justice: A Critical Reader, which contacins a chapter on feminist legal ethics.

Janie Chuang:

Janie Chuang specializes in the study of violence against women, specifically trafficking in women. She draws on her work in these areas for the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women. Recently, Professor Chuang published "The United States as Global Sheriff: Unilateral Sanctions and Human Trafficking," in the Michigan Journal of International Law. Professor Chuang teaches International Law, Commercial Arbitration, Trafficking, and a seminar on Gender, Labor and the Global Economy.

 

Mary Clark:

Mary Clark is an Associate Professor at the WCL teaching Property, Legal Ethics, a judicial externship seminar, and a course on U.S. Women's Legal History. In addition, Professor Clark is Director of the SJD Program and Acting Director of the Program on Law and Governmet. Professor Clark was a visiting lecturer and research scholar at Yale Law School and a Supreme Court fellow with the Federal Judicial Center. She clerked for the U.S. Court of Appeals in Montgomery, Alabama before joining the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission as an appellate attorney, concentrating on issues of sexual harassment and disability rights law.

 
 

Kristina Filipovich:

Kristina Filipovich is an associate in Jenner & Block;s Washington, DC office and a member of the Firm's Litigation Department. At Jenner & Block, Ms. Filipovich's pro bono practice focuses on representing victims on human trafficking. Prior to attendingf law school, Ms. Filipovich worked on gender and human rights issues for over ten years in the U.S. and overseas. As staff to Presiden Clinton's National Advisory Council on Violence Against Women, she researched and co-authored the Agenda for the Nationi to End Violence Against Women. As a Consultant and Interim Director for Women for Women International, she helped lead all management and programmatic aspects of expanding human rights training and micro-credit lending to women in war-torn countries. Ms. Filipovich was a delegate to the United Nations World Conference on Women in Beiijing and then spent a year researching the impact of this conference on women's rights in Thailand, Fiji, Australia, and Belize through the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. Ms. Filipovich has also served as a consultant to the U.S. Department of Justice Violence Against Women Office, the Centers for Disease Control, and the nonprofit programs that adress gender issues: The Domestic Violence Pro Bono Project (at Stanford Law School), which utilizes law students to obtain restraining orders for victims of domestic violence, and Occidental Partnership Assistant Women, which pairs college mentors with teens and teenage mothers who have been removed from their homes due to abuse. She teaches the Gender Perspectives Across the World seminar at Washington College of Law.

Dean Claudio Grossman:

Claudio Grossman is the Dean of Washington College of Law. Dean Grossman served as the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights' (IACHR) first Special Rapporteur on Women's Rights (1996-2000) and authored the IACHR's first report on women's rights. He has also worked on cases involving gender issues, including Maria Eugenia Morales de Sierra (Guatemala), at the IACHR.

Hadar Harris:

Hadar Harris is the Executive Director of the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law. She is an international human rights attorney specializing in civil and political rights, gender equality and domestic accountability, and implementation of international norms. She has done significant work assessing compliance with CEDAW in various countries around the world. Ms. Harris has helped to create the first-ever network of legal acaademics and activists discussing gender mainstreaming and legal education in India, the Gender and Law Association of India (GALA). She also tirects the Center's University of Peshawar Collaborative Exchange and Capacity Building Program, which aims to build capacity within the Gender Studies department and the Human Rights Studies Centar at the University of Peshawar.

Heather Hughes:

Heather Hughes teaches in the areas of commercial law and property. Her research focuses on commercial transactions, social justice, ethics and critical theory. Before joining the faculty at WCL, Professor Hughes practiced in the business department at Morrison & Foerster, LLP in San Franscisco, and the commercial transactions group at a small, private firm in Denver. She has published several articles on gender and law, including Contradictions, Open Secrets, and Feminist Faith in Enlightenment, in the Hastings Women's Law Journal (2002) and Same-Sex Marriage and Simulacra: Exploring Conceptions of Equality in the Harvard Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Law Review (1998).

 

Darren Hutchinson:

Darren Hutchinson teaches Constitutional Law, Equitable Remedies, and seminars in Critical Race Theory and Equal Protection Theory. He has written extensively on issues related to constitutional law, critical race theory, law and sexuality, and social identity theory. Before joining the faculty at WCL, Professor Hutchinson was an Associate Professor at Southern Methodist University School of Law and practiced commercial litigation.

 
 

Ann Jordan:

Ann Jordan is Director of the Program on Forced Labor and Trafficking at the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law. She is an international human rights attorney who specializes in issues of human trafficking, forced labor and women's rights. She was the Director for ten years of the Initiative against Trafficking in Persons at Global Rights. She actively participated with an international coalition of NGOs in the development of the UN Trafficking Protocol and with a U.S. NGO coalition in the development of the U.S. Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act. She was a member of the Women's Caucus for Gender Justice in the International Criminal Court, which successfully advocated during the negotiation process for the inclusion of women and women's issues at all levels of the Court. In addition, Ms. Jordan was intimately involved in developing the Freedom Network (USA) to Empower Trafficked and Enslaved Persons, premier U.S. NGO anti-trafficking network of service providers and advocates.

Billie Jo Kaufman:

Billie Jo Kaufman is the Associate Dean for Library Information Resources and teaches and specializes in: advanced legal research; cyberlaw; criminal procedure; legal research and writing, and law librarianship. In addition, she serves on the AALS Women & the Law Newsletter, as a Board Member for the Friends of the Law Library of Congress and as Chair for the ABA Committee on Law Libraries.
 

Elizabeth Keyes:

Elizabeth Keyes is a Practitioner-in-Residence with the International Human Rights Law Clinic. In her practice at CASA of Maryland and WEAVE, she has specialized in working with immigrant women, in the immigration, employment, family law and criminal contexts. She is interested in the power structures that affect immigrant women's ability to exercise and enjoy their rights, and has specifically focused on the situation of immigrant domestic workers. She has most recently co- authored an ABA manual on the intersection of human trafficking and domestic violence.

Daniela Kraiem:

Daniela Kraiem is the Associate Director of the Women and the Law Program and a Practitioner- in-Residence at WCL where she plans academic conerences on various subjects in the ara of feminist jurisprudence, collaborates with student groups to plan events on current issues in gender and law, works with the Academic Dean's office to support WCL's comprehensive Gender and Law specializations in Washington College of Law's two LLM programs. Prior to joining WCL, she represented labor unions and employees as an associate at the law firm of McCarthy, Johnson and Miller in San Franscisco. She was also a staff attorney at the Child Care Law Center, where she specialized in early childhood education workforce development, supporting women-owned small businesses, and increasing
the availability of high quality child care for all children. Her current research interests include the political economy of long term care for the elderly and persons with disabilities, child care, and gender and legal education.

 

Julianna Lee:

Julianna Lee teaches a seminar on Domestic Violence at WCL. Ms. Lee is a staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society of DC and represents low-income individuals in domestic violence and family law cases. At Legal Aid, Ms. Lee also focuses on policy issues concerning statutory protections for domestic violence survivors in the District of Columbia. Prior to joining Legal Aid, Ms. Lee worked on juvenile justice and mental health issues with the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama.
 

Sharon Levin:

Sharon Levin is an attorney who has focused most of her 18 years of legal practice on wonen's law and policy and has extensive experience on women's health issues. As legislative counsel to Congresswoman Nita Lowey, she coordinated efforts to protect women's health in the House of Representatives as manager of both the Congressional Caucus for Women's Issues and the Congressional Pro-Choice Caucus. At the National Women's Law Center, Ms. Levin managed the creation of "Making the Grade: A National State-by-State Women's Health Report Card" which graded the states on over 30 health indicators and over 70 policy indicators. Most recently, she has served as a legal policy consultant working on health-care reform at NARAL Pro-Choice America. In addition, as an adjunct professor at Washington College of Law, she has taught Sex Discrimination, Feminist Jurisprudence and Legislative Process. She is currently teaching a seminar on Gender & Health Law & Policy.

 

Amy K. Matsui:

Amy K Matsui is a Senior Counsel at the National Women's Law Center where she works on economic issues affecting low- and moderate-income women and families, with special emphasis on federal and state tax policy. Her work includes analysis of federal and state tax credits for working families, technical assistance to state advocates with regard to such credits, federal advocacy, and coordinating the Center's tax credits outreach campaign. She also works on issues pertaining to women's retirement security and judicial nominations. Ms. Matsui has been with the Center in the private sector. She clerked for the Honorable Carolyn Dineen King, then-Chief Judge of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, in 2000. She is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, and Stanford Law School. She is teaching Family Law this fall.

Angie McCarthy:

Angie McCarthy is the Program Coordinator for the Women and the Law Program. She holds an MPhil from Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland in International Peace Studies. Her graduate research focused on the role of women in peace building in post-conflict societies and prospects for future implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security. In addition to her work at the Women and the Law Program, Angie is a JD Candidate in the evening program at WCL.

 

Amy Myers:

Amy Myers directs the Domestic Violence Clinic, where students represent clients in protection order and immigration cases. Prior to joining WCL, she was a supervising attorney at Women Empowered Against Violence (WEAVE), where she represented survivors of domestic violence in family law and immigration cases. She began at WEAVE as a Skadden Fellow, focusing on the intersection of domestic violence and child abuse.

Fernanda Nicola:

Fernanda Nicola is an expert in European and Comparative Law, the law of European Union, Contracts, and Tort Law. Her teaching and research interests are in the area of Comparative law, European Union law and Comparative Family Law. She received her PhD from Trento University (Italy) and her SJD degree from Harvard Law School where she was the recipient of the Mancini Prize in European Law, and of the Justice Welfare and Economics felowship at the Weatherhead Center for International affairs.

 

Teresa Godwin-Phelps:

Teresa Godwin Phelps is the Director of the Legal Rhetoric Program. Her other teaching and academic interests include law and literature, international truth commissions, women and the law, and human rights. She has published over thirty articles and three books, most recently Shattered Voices: Language, Violence, and the Work of Truth Commissions (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).

Victoria Phillips:

Victoria Philips is the Assistant Director of the Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Law Clinic and teaches Communications Law. She headed the mass media legal policy office at the Federal Communications Commission and practiced intellectual property and communications law in Washington, D.C. before joining the clinic faculty. Professor Phillips is one of the principal organizers of the annual Symposium on IP/Gender: Mapping the Connections and recently published "Commodification, Intellectual Property and the Women of Gee's Bend" in the American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & Law.

Nancy Polikoff:

Nancy Polikoff teaches Family Law and Sexuality and the Law and specializes in the legal issues affecting lesbian and gay families. Before joining the WCL faculty in 1987, she directed domestic relations programs at the Women's Legal Defense Fund and practiced law with the Washington, D.C. Feminist Law Collective. Her book, Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage: Valuing All Families under the Law, was published by Beacon Press in 2008.

Adeen Postar:

Adeen Postar joined the library faculty as the Deputy Director of the Pence Law Library in 2004. Professor Postar has had extensive experience in law firm, academic, and government libraries. She is the Associate Editor of State Practice Materials: Annotated Bibliographies published by Hein. In addition to her administrative duties, Ms. Postar also teaches Advanced Legal Research Techniques at WCL.

Susana SáCouto:

Susana SaCouto is the Director of the War Crimes Research Office (WCRO) at WCL where she also teaches Gender, Cultural Difference, Human Rights, and the Law and Women and Conflict: International Law Responses. Prior to joining the WCRO, Ms. SaCaoto directed the Legal Services Program at Women Empowered Against Violence She also served as co-chair of the Women's International Law Interest Group of the American Society for International Law (2006-2009 term), and was recently awarded The Women's Law Center 22nd Annual Dorothy Beatty Memorial Award for significant contributions to women's rights. She recently published an essay entitled "Advances and Missed Opportunities in the International Prosecution of Gender-Based Crimes" in the Michigan State Journal of International Law (2007).

Macarena Saez:

Macarena Saez is a Fellow in International Legal Studies teaching in the areas of comparative law and gender. Before coming to WCL, she taught jurisprudence and feminist legal theory at the University of Chile. She is the coordinator of Red-ALAS, a network of Latin American feminist scholars that develops gender initiatives in Latin American law schools, with the support of the Ford Foundation. She is one of the two general editors of the first casebook on gender and sexuality in Latin America, La Mirada de los Jueces: Decisiones sobre Genero y Sexualidad en Latinoamerica (Siglo del El HombrePress, 2008).

Ann Shalleck:

Ann Shalleck founded and directs the Women and the Law Program and Women and International Law Program. She is also the Carrington Shields Scholar at Washington College of Law. She teaches in the Women & the Law Clinic, Family Law, Feminist Jurisprudence, and a seminar on Theories of Pedagogy. She is active in national and international efforts to reshape the law school curriculum. Professor Shalleck was a member of the DC Task Force on Gender Bias in the Courts. Her writing focuses on clinical education, feminist theory, family law, and child neglect.

Brenda Smith:

Brenda Smith teaches in the Community Economic Development Law Clinic. She is also the Project Director for the United States Department of Justice, National Institute of Corrections Cooperative Agreement on Addressing Staff Sexual Misconduct with Offenders. In November, 2003, Professor Smith was appointed to the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission by the United States House of Representatives Minority Leader, Nancy Pelosi (D. CA). Professor Smith is an expert on issues affecting women in prison. Most recently, she was awarded the Emmalee C. Godsey Research Award for her article Battering, Forgiveness and Redemption. Professor Smith teaches a seminar on Women, Crime and the Law.

Anthony E Varona:

Anthony E. Varona teaches Contracts, Administrative Law, Media Law, and Introduction to Public Law. Before joining the WCL faculty he served as general counsel and legal director for the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest gay civil rights organization. He is an active memeber of the Hispanic National Bar Association and the National Lesbian and Gay Lawyers Association and is also on the national board of GLAAD. Professor Varona's scholarhip has included articles concerning civil rights, employment discrimination, hate crimes, and communications law.

Sofia Yakren:

Sofia Yakren is a Practitioner-in-Residence with the Women and the Law Clinic. Prior to joining the WCL faculty, Sofia was a civil rights litigator at Beldock Levine & Hoffman LLP, where she represented individual and class plaintiffs in employment discrimination, false arrest, and wrongful conviction actions. Before that, as an Arthur Liman Public Interest Fellow at the Mental Health Project of the Urban Justice Center, Sofia challenged violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act in New York City’s welfare system. Sofia also served as a law clerk to the Honorable Nancy Gertner of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts.