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.

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 contains 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 Government. 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 attending law school, Ms. Filipovich worked on gender and human rights issues for over ten years in the U.S. and overseas. As staff to President Clinton's National Advisory Council on Violence Against Women, she researched and co-authored the Agenda for the Nation 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.

Llezlie Green Coleman:

Llezlie Green Coleman is a Practioner-in-Residence with the General Practice Clinic. Prior to arriving at WCL, she was an attorney in the Civil Rights and Employment practice at Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll, where she represented plaintiffs in class actions alleging employment, fair housing, and credit discrimination, as well as wage and hour violations. Prior to working at Cohen Milstein, Llezlie was a law clerk for the Honorable Alexander Williams, Jr., United States District Judge for the District of Maryland. She also interned with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Center for Constitutional Rights. Lezlie is an Associate Trustee with the Washington Lawyer's Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and Co-Chair of the ABA Labor and Employment Section's Committee on Equal Opportunity in the Legal Profession.

Sharra E. Greer:

Sharra E. Greer works as the first ever policy director at the Children's Law Center.  She also developed the policy department at Servicemembers Legal Defense Network (SLDN). In addition to creating and supervising that policy department, she supervised the group’s successful legal services and impact litigation efforts. Sharra began her legal services work while at Rutgers Law School, when she worked at Camden Regional Legal Services. After law school, Ms. Greer was an associate with the firm of Weissman & Mintz, specializing in plaintiffs’ side employment discrimination and labor law. She left Weissman & Mintz to serve as a staff attorney with the National Veterans Legal Services Program (NVLSP). Recently, she helped design and create Lawyers Serving Warriors, a program which provides pro bono legal services for returning veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.

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 academics 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 Center at the University of Peshawar.
 

Jasmine Harris:

Jasmine Elwick Harris is a Practitioner-in-Residence with the Disability Rights Legal Clinic. Prior to arriving at WCL, she was a staff attorney with the Schoolhouse to Jailhouse and Quality Education Projects at Advancement Project, a national civil rights organization, where she focused on racial justice in education. Prior to working at Advancement Project, Jasmin was a Senior Associate at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr LLP, where she practiced across a wide range of substantive areas, including complex civil litgation, government investigations, and pro bono cases.

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.

 

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.

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 conferences on various subjects in the area 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.

 

Sharon Levin:

Sharon Levin is an attorney who has focused most of her 18 years of legal practice on women'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.

 

Natalie Nanasi:

Natalie Nanasi is a Practitioner-in-Residence and the Director of the Domestic Violence Clinic, through which students represent survivors in immigration and civil protection order cases. For five years prior to her arrival at WCL, she served as an attorney at the Tahirih Justice Center, where she represented immigrant women and girls fleeing gender-based violence such as female genital mutilation, rape, domestic violence, forced marriage and honor crimes. She is the author of several articles about the U visa, a form of immigration relief for victims of serious crimes, and of Lessons from Matter of A-T-: Guidance for Practitioners Litigating Asylum Cases Involving a Spectrum of Gender-Based harms, From Female Genital Mutilation to Forced Marriage and Beyond, which was published in West’s February 2012 Immigration Briefings. Prior to her legal career, Professor Nanasi volunteered as a rape crisis counselor and assisted single teenage mothers at a transitional residence facility in Boston.

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.

 

Leslye Orloff:

Leslye Orloff is the Director of the National Immigrant Women’s Advocacy Project (NIWAP) at American University Washington College of Law which advocates for laws, policies and practices that enhance legal options for immigrant women and immigrant victims domestic violence, sexual assault and human trafficking. She founded and directed the Immigrant Women Program at Legal Momentum and the National Network to End Violence Against Immigrant Women. She helped draft federal legislation offering immigration relief, welfare benefits, and legal services to immigrant victims and is a nationally respected trainer and author.  For 17 years Leslye represented immigrant victims in family court cases in D.C. at Ayuda. Leslye received her J.D. from the UCLA, and her B.A. from Brandeis University. She is the recipient of the 2007 Sheila Wellstone Award, a 1994 Kellogg National Leadership Fellowship and a 2002 Harvard Law School Wasserstein Public Interest Law Fellowship.

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.
 

Chai Shenoy:

Chai Shenoy teaches the Domestic Violence seminar. Professor Shenoy is the co-founder of Collective Action for Safe Spaces, a community-based, volunteer run organization whose aim is to educate and address public sexual harassment and assault in the DC Metro area. Chai is an attorney at Network for Victim Recovery of DC representing sexual assault survivors with their civil legal needs which include obtaining civil protection orders, representation at university and public school educational hearings, advocating with housing authorities, and providing family law assistance. In addition, she works at Peace Corps' Office of the General Counsel developing policies and protocols on addressing sexual violence. Previously, Chai worked at WEAVE, Inc., Break the Cycle (Georgetown University Law School Women’s Law and Public Policy fellow '09-'10), and the Manhattan Borough President’s Office as the Domestic Violence Policy Analyst. During her time in NYC, Chai authored Hidden in Plain Sight: Sexual Harassment and Sexual Assault in the New York City Subways, a report that studied the prevalence of sexual violence occurring in New York City subways trains and stations. Chai received her B.A. at UCLA and her J.D. at American University, Washington College of Law.

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.

Shana Tabak:

Shana Tabak teaches in the International Human Rights Clinic. Before joining the WCL faculty, Professor Tabak was a Visiting Associate Professor of Clinical Law and a Friedman Fellow with the International Human Rights Clinic at George Washington Law. There, she supervised students and taught human rights litigation in the Inter-American system, at the United Nations, and in U.S. courts. Her background is in human rights, immigrant and refugee rights, and public international law.  Prior to joining GW Law, Professor Tabak served as a law clerk for H.E. Bernardo Sepúlveda-Amor at the International Court of Justice, and worked with several non-governmental organizations on human rights in Latin America and the Middle East, including the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights (now Human Rights First) in New York, and Gisha: Legal Center for Freedom of Movement in Israel. Her immigration and refugee experience includes handling cases on behalf of immigrant women and girls fleeing gender-based violence at the Tahirih Justice Center in Washington, DC, and on behalf of Iraqi refugees while working with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Amman, Jordan.  Professor Tabak’s academic interests include international law, transitional justice, gender and human rights, and the domestic application of human rights law within the United States. She was a Fulbright Scholar in Bolivia, where she conducted independent research on migration, human rights and development. She has published articles on international law with the Georgetown Journal of International Law and the New York University Law School Journal of International Law and Policy, and has spoken on transitional justice and feminism at Oxford University.

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.