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.
Jamie Abrams:
Jamie Abrams teaches Legal Rhetoric and Sex-Based Discrimination. Her scholarship interests include legal protections for immigrant victims of domestic violence, legal responses to violence against women, and the advancement and retention of women in the legal profession. She serves on the Executive Committee of the DC Women's Bar Association and she was awarded the WBA's Mussey-Gillett Shining Star Award in 2008 for her work co-authoring two reports on the advancement and retention of women lawyers.
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 teaches Property, Legal Ethics, and a seminar on Women's Legal History/History of Women in the Legal Profession. 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.
Christine Haight Farley:
Christine Haight Farley is a professor and Associate Dean for Faculty and Academic Affairs. Professor Farley teaches courses in Intellectual Property Law, U.S. Trademark Law, International and Comparative Trademark Law, and Law and the Visual Arts. Professor Farley works with the Women and the Law Program to co-sponsor an annual symposium entitled "IP/ Gender: Mapping the Connections" that examines the intersection between intellectual property and gender.
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 is an active participant in the Gender and Legal Education in India Project. She teaches Gender, Cultural Difference and Human Rights.
Heather Hughes:
Heather Hughes joined the WCL faculty in 2007. Previously she taught at Florida International University College of Law where she was also affiliated with the Women's Studies Department. Her interests include sales and secured transactions. 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.
Lisa Jabaily:
Lisa Jabaily is an adjunct member of the faculty who teaches Family Law and Local Government Law. Her current scholarship focuses on how schools and cities define and administer households. Professor Jabaily is also an attorney in the Office of the Vice President and General Counsel at the Johns Hopkins University, where she works primarily on compliance, labor/employment, discrimination, and sponsored research issues.
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.
Laurie S. Kohn:
Laurie S. Kohn is a visiting member of the WCL faculty. She teaches Domestic Violence. She is also the deputy director of the Georgetown Law Center's Domestic Violence Clinic, where she has taught since 1998. Previously, Professor Kohn focused on disability rights, both in Congress and at the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice. Professor Kohn has written several practice documents on representing victims of domestic violence including an updated practice manual entitled Litigating Civil Protection Order Cases: a Practice Manual. In addition, Professor Kohn is the Chair of the steering committee of the D.C. Bar Family Law Section and serves on the boards of the D.C. Coalition Against Domestic Violence and the Frederick B. Abramson Memorial Foundation. She is the Co-Chair of the Domestic Violence Unit Task Force of D.C. Superior Court.
Candace Kovacic-Fleischer:
Candace Kovacic-Fleischer teaches Sex-based Discrimination, Contracts, Remedies, and a seminar on Employment Law: Work Family and Equality. She clerked in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit and for U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren E. Burger and practiced with two Washington, D.C. law firms. She has written numerous articles on gender discrimination issues as well as articles and a textbook on remedies. She also contributed to compilations including The Oxford Companions to American Law (2002), The Encyclopedia of the American Constitution (2000), and The Encyclopedia of American Civil Liberties (2006).
Daniela Kraiem:
Daniela Kraiem is the Associate Director of the Women and the Law Program and a Practitioner- in-Residence. She teaches Gender, Inequality and the State and the Gender Perspectives Across the World seminar, a course in which students have the opportunity to write publishable quality papers on subjects relating to gender and international or comparative law. Prior to joining WCL, she represented labor unions and employees as an associate at the law firm of McCarthy, Johnson and Miller. She started her legal career as a staff attorney at the non-profit Child Care Law Center, where she specialized in workforce development, supporting women-owned small businesses, and increasing
the availability of high quality child care for all children.
Adrienne Lockie:
Adrienne Lockie teaches in the Women and the Law Clinic. She began her teaching career at Rutgers School of Law-Newark in 2004 where she was the Director of the Domestic Violence Advocacy Project and taught in the Women's Rights Litigation Clinic. Prior to entering academia, Professor Lockie represented victims of domestic violence at Safe Horizon's Domestic Violence Law Project and was a Blackmun Fellow at the Center for Reproductive Rights. She teaches Advanced Family Law, Legal Ethics and the Women and the Law Clinic Seminar.
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.
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 teaches Torts, Comparative Law, and European Union Law. Prior to teaching at WCL, Professor Nicola was an Adjunct Professor of Law at the New England School of Law and taught at Harvard Law School and the University of Turin Law School. She is publishing an Italian reader on United States Feminist Jurisprudence with Carocci (Rome) and she is writing on domestic torts and comparative family law.
Corrine Parver:
Corrine Parver is a Practitioner-in-Residence and the Executive Director of the Health Law Project and the Faculty Advisor to the Health Law and Justice Initiative and the WCL Health Law and Policy publication. Her areas of specialization include: fraud and abuse prevention and compliance; general health law and policy; privacy; and medical liability. She researches the effect of the medical malpractice insurance crisis on women's health, particularly women of color. Other research projects include: Patient-tailored Medicine and Women's Roles in Clinical Trials, and Health Care Reform Initiatives and the Effect of Certain Proposals on Women.
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 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 the International Programs Coordinator at WCL. 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. She has recently finished work on La Mirada de los Jueces: Decisiones sobre Genero y Sexualidad en Latinoamerica (Editorial Siglo del El Hombre, 2008), the first book of case studies on gender and law in Latin America.
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 has been an active participant in the Gender and Legal Education in India Project.
David Spratt:
David Spratt is an Academic Coordinator and Professor of Legal Writing. He also teaches Legal Drafting: Family Law Litigation and Practice. Prior to teaching Legal Rhetoric, Professor Spratt taught Legal Writing and Research at the George Washington University School of Law, Legal Analysis and Writing at Concord School of Law, and Legal Methods at the Washington College of Law. In the past, he has moderated and/or presented continuing legal education programs on defined duration support, imputation of income, amendments to the Virginia child support statute, legal ethics, research and citation, the use of electronic evidence in family law cases, child custody evaluations, legal writing teaching methodology, and writing strategies. In 2001, Professor Spratt was a founding partner of Schwartz & Spratt, PLC, a family law firm in Fairfax, Virginia. Professor Spratt has a quarterly column, Writer's Block, in the Virginia Bar Association News Journal.
Anthony E Varona:
Anthony E. Varona teaches Contracts, Administrative Law, Media Law, and Introduction to Public Law, and serves as the Director of the SJD Program. 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 member 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 scholarship has included articles concerning civil rights, employment discrimination, hate crimes, and communications law.
Diane Weinroth:
Diane Weinroth has taught at WCL for more than 15 years as a clinical instructor and adjunct professor with the Women and the Law Clinic. She also has had a private practice specializing in family law and child abuse and neglect. She is co-author of the first edition of Practice Manual for Child Abuse and Neglect Cases in the District of Columbia. Among other professional activities, she is on the board of directors of The Children's Law Center and the Ionia Whipper Home for Girls and has been a contributing columnist for "Child Welfare Practice," published by the ABA Center on Children and the Law.