Speaker Bios

Margalynne Armstrong (Santa Clara)

Margalynne Armstrong is an Associate Professor of Law and an Associate Academic Director of the Center for Social Justice and Public Service at Santa Clara University. Prior to teaching at Santa Clara Law, she practiced in public employment law, was a staff attorney with the Legal Aid Society of Alameda County, and directed the Academic Support Program at Boalt Hall. Professor Armstrong teaches Property, Race and Racism in the Law, and Constitutional Law.
 

Cynthia Grant Bowman (Cornell)

Cynthia Grant Bowman is the Dorothea S. Clarke Professor of Feminist Jurisprudence at Cornell Law School. A graduate of Swarthmore College, she has a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University and a J.D. from Northwestern University School of Law. She has published widely in diverse areas having to do with family law and other topics concerning law and gender and is co-author of FEMINIST JURISPRUDENCE: TAKING WOMEN SERIOUSLY(West Publishing 3d ed. 2006). Her most recent books are UNMARRIED COUPLES, LAW, AND PUBLIC POLICY (Oxford University Press 2010), and DAWN CLARK NETSCH: A POLITICAL LIFE (Northwestern University Press 2010). Professor Bowman’s Law Stories chapter discusses Blank v. Sullivan & Cromwell and the entry of women into Wall Street law firms in the mid-1970s.

Patricia Cain (Santa Clara)

Patricia Cain is the Inez Mabie Distinguished Professor of Law at Santa Clara University. Before joining the Santa Clara faculty in 2007, she served as Vice Provost and Aliber Family Chair in Law at the University of Iowa. She was a member of the law faculty at the University of Texas for 17 years before moving to the University of Iowa College of Law in 1991. She is a graduate of Vassar College (A.B.) and the University of Georgia (J.D.). A member of the American Law Institute and prior board member of Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, she is a former co-president (with Jean Love) of the Society of American Law Teachers (SALT). She is currently serving as Treasurer of SALT. Professor Cain teaches courses in Federal Taxation, Wills and Estates, Property, Feminist Legal Theory, and Sexuality and the Law. She is a frequent lecturer on tax planning for same-sex couples and has published law review articles in journals such as the Iowa Law Review, the Southern California Law Review, the Virginia Law Review, the Wisconsin Law Review and the Journal of Legal Education. She also has published several book chapters, including “stories” in both TAX STORIES AND PROPERTY STORIES, as well as monographs and books, including RAINBOW RIGHTS: THE ROLE OF LAWYERS AND COURTS IN THE LESBIAN AND GAY CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT (Westview Press 2000) and SEXUALITY LAW, Second Edition (with Arthur S. Leonard) (Carolina Academic Press 2009).

Martha Chamallas (Ohio State)

Martha Chamallas holds the Robert J. Lynn Chair in Law at the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio where she teaches Gender and the Law, Torts, and Employment Discrimination. Prior to joining the Ohio State faculty, she was on the faculty at LSU, the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Iowa and has held distinguished visiting Chairs at Washington University, the University of Richmond and Suffolk University. At Iowa, she was Chair of the Women’s Studies Program. In 2007, she was named a University Distinguished Lecturer at Ohio State. Her book, INTRODUCTION TO FEMINIST LEGAL THEORY (Aspen Publishers, 2d edition 2003) has been widely adopted for law courses and seminars and interdisciplinary offerings on gender. In torts, she has written extensively about hidden biases in the calculation of damages and the low status accorded to non-economic harms, such as emotional distress and relational injuries. In anti-discrimination law, she has published articles on sexual harassment, constructive discharge, pay equity, tokenism, unconscious race and gender bias and the processes of devaluation. Her articles and essays have appeared in numerous journals, including Michigan Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Southern California Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review and William and Mary Law Review. Her forthcoming book – THE MEASURE OF INJURY: RACE, GENDER AND TORT LAW – (co-authored with Jennifer B. Wriggins) will be published by New York University Press in May 2010. She is a member of the Litigation Committee for the American Association of University Professors and the American Law Institute.

Zanita E. Fenton (Miami) 

Zanita E. Fenton is Professor of Law at the University of Miami School of Law, where she teaches courses in Constitutional Law, Family Law, Torts, Race and the Law, and seminars in Critical Race Feminism and in the Reproductive Technologies.
Professor Fenton’s scholarly interests cover issues of subordination, focusing on those of race, gender and class. She explores these issues in the greater contexts of understanding violence and in the attainment of justice. She writes in these areas and regularly speaks concerning these and related topics in both national and international fora. She has long served as an advocate and consultant for survivors of domestic abuse. Professor Fenton received an A.B. from Princeton University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School, where she served as editor-in-chief of the Harvard BlackLetter Journal. After law school, she practiced briefly in the New York firm of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton before she served as a law clerk to the Honorable Edward R. Korman, United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York.
 

Martha A. Field (Harvard)

Martha A. Field has been a Professor of Law at Harvard Law School since 1978, and is now the Langdell Professor of Law. She teaches courses in Constitutional Law, Federal Courts, Disability, Bioethics and Family Law, and in other subjects. She received her B.A. from Harvard and her J.D. from the University of Chicago. Upon graduation in 1968, she served as a law clerk on the United States Supreme Court, working with Justice Abe Fortas during his unsuccessful hearings to be confirmed as Chief Justice and continued working with him until his resignation the next May. She then spent six weeks working for Chief Justice Warren, followed by another six weeks working with Chief Justice Burger. She was the only woman clerk during that Term and one of the first women to obtain a Supreme Court clerkship. After the Supreme Court, Professor Field joined the law faculty of the University of Pennsylvania (where she was the first and only woman professor for several years and the first woman to receive tenure). She remained at Penn until moving to Harvard Law School in 1978 as their only tenured woman professor.

 

Angela P. Harris (Berkeley)

Angela P. Harris is Baldy Distinguished Scholar at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, and Professor of Law, University of California-Berkeley. She has written widely in the field of critical jurisprudence and is co-author of several casebooks, including CRIMINAL LAW: CASES AND MATERIALS (with Cynthia Lee), ECONOMIC JUSTICE (with Emma Coleman Jordan), and RACE AND RACES: CASES AND RESOURCES FOR A DIVERSE AMERICA (with Richard Delgado, Juan Perea, Jean Stefancic, and Stephanie Wildman).

Lynne Henderson (UNLV)

Lynne Henderson is a Professor of Law at UNLV-Boyd School of Law. She earned her AB in Political Science from Stanford University in 1975 and her JD from Stanford Law School in 1979. She worked briefly as a DDA and then practiced criminal defense and other matters as a DPD and in private practice. Her articles and essays have appeared in Stanford Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Indiana Law Journal, Law & Philosophy, Berkeley Women’s Law Journal (now Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law and Justice), Texas Women’s Law Journal, Law & Social Inquiry, Law & Society Review, and other publications. She teaches Constitutional Law I and II, Criminal Law, and a seminar on Violence Against Women. Her research interests span from victim’s rights to violence against women and children to judicial decision-making and more recently have focused on the decisions of torture detainees in the “War on Terror.”

Lisa C. Ikemoto (Davis)

Lisa C. Ikemoto is on the faculty at University of California – Davis School of Law. She teaches Bioethics, Health Care Law, Public Health Law, Reproductive Rights, Law & Policy, Marital Property, and Property. Her research areas include bioethics, reproductive justice, health care law, and public health law. More specifically, she focuses on the ways that race and gender mediate access to and impacts of technology use, health care, and law. She has written about race and gender disparities in health care, genetic and reproductive technology use, the regulation of fertility and pregnancy.

Minna J. Kotkin (Brooklyn)

Minna J. Kotkin joined the Brooklyn Law School faculty in 1984 and is the director of the BLS Employment Law Clinic. She also has taught New York practice, civil procedure, administrative law, civil rights law, and interviewing and counseling.

Professor Kotkin has written and lectured extensively on issues of employment discrimination and clinical legal education. Her recent articles include Diversity and Discrimination: A Look at Complex Bias (William & Mary Law Review, 2009), Outing Outcomes: An Empirical Study of Confidential Employment Discrimination Settlements (Washington and Lee Law Review, 2007), and Invisible Settlements, Invisible Discrimination (North Carolina Law Review, 2006). Professor Kotkin has been a visiting scholar at New York University School of Law, University of East London, and the University of Cape Town.

She has served as the chair of the Association of American Law Schools' Section on Litigation, and Section on Clinical Legal Education, on the steering committee of the Association's Equal Justice Project, and on the Board of Editors of the Clinical Law Review. She currently serves on the board of directors of the Global Alliance for Justice Education, Disability Advocates, Inc. and the United State District Court, Eastern District of New York Litigation Fund, and has previously been a board member of several legal services organizations.

Before joining the Brooklyn faculty in 1984, Professor Kotkin was the litigation director of New York Lawyers for the Public Interest and a litigation associate at Proskauer Rose. She was graduated from Rutgers University Law School - Camden, where she was Editor-in-Chief of the law review, and Barnard College.
 

Sylvia A. Law (NYU)

Sylvia A. Law has been one of the nation's leading scholars in the fields of health law, women's rights, poverty, and constitutional law for three decades. She has played a major role in dozens of civil rights cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and in lower state and federal courts, and has testified before Congress and state legislatures on a range of issues. In 1984, Law became the first lawyer in the United States selected as a MacArthur Prize Fellow. She is the co-director, with Norman Dorsen, of the Arthur Garfield Hays Program at New York University School of Law. She has been active in the Society of American Law Teachers, served as president of the organization from 1988-1990 and was honored by the organization as Law Teacher of the Year in 2001. In 2004, Prof. Law was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Stacy L. Leeds (Kansas)

Stacy L. Leeds is Professor of Law and Director of the Tribal Law and Government Center at the University of Kansas School of Law. Professor Leeds began her law teaching career at the University of Wisconsin School of Law where she served as a William H. Hastie Fellow. She is the recipient of several awards for her teaching, scholarship and service including the Alphonse Fletcher, Sr. Fellowship (2008), the Clyde Ferguson Award (AALS Section on Minority Groups 2006), and the Immel Award for Teaching Excellence (2005). She is a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis (BA), the University of Tulsa College of Law, (JD) and the University of Wisconsin School of Law (LLM). Professor Leeds is a former Cherokee Nation Supreme Court Justice, the only woman and youngest person to have served in that capacity. She has also served as a judge and consultant for several other tribal governments including: Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation, Muscogee (Creek) Nation, Kickapoo Tribe of Oklahoma, Kaw Nation, and Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. She is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation.

Jean C. Love (Santa Clara)

Jean C. Love is the John A. and Elizabeth H. Sutro Professor of Law at Santa Clara University. Before joining the Santa Clara faculty in 2007, she was the Martha-Ellen Tye Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Iowa. She served as a member of the faculty at UC-Davis for 19 years before moving to the University of Iowa College of Law in 1991. She received a B.A. and a J.D. from the University of Wisconsin. She teaches constitutional law, remedies, and torts. She is the recipient of three Distinguished Teaching Awards (from the University of Iowa, the University of Texas, and the UC-Davis School of Law). A member of the American Law Institute, she is a former co-president (with Patricia Cain) of the Society of American Law Teachers (SALT). She has chaired the Women in Legal Education Section and the Gay and Lesbian Legal Issues Section (as it was then known), as well as the Remedies Section and the Torts and Compensation Systems Section of the Association of American Law Schools. She is a frequent lecturer on bringing issues of race, sex, and sexual orientation into the law school curriculum. She has published several articles and book reviews with a focus on gender and sexual orientation, including Discriminatory Speech and the Tort of Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress, 47 Washington & Lee Law Review 123 (1990) and The Synergistic Evolution of Liberty and Equality in Marriage Cases Brought by Same-Sex Couples in State Courts, 13 Journal of Gender Race and Justice 276 (2010). She is also the author of two casebooks, EQUITABLE REMEDIES, RESTITUTION AND DAMAGES (7th ed. 2005) and AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ANGLO-AMERICAN LEGAL SYSTEM (4th ed. 2004). She would like to thank her co-author, Pat Cain, for making all of her dreams come true when they were legally married in the State of California on October 4, 2008.

Serena Mayeri (Penn)

Serena Mayeri’s scholarship focuses on the historical impact of progressive and conservative social movements on legal and constitutional change. She is currently at work on a book, tentatively titled REASONING FROM RACE: LEGAL FEMINISM IN THE CIVIL RIGHTS ERA, which explores how lawyers, judges, activists, politicians, and ordinary citizens reasoned about the relationship between racial justice and women’s rights during the 1960s and 1970s. In addition to anti-discrimination law and legal history, Professor Mayeri’s research and teaching interests include family law and policy. She earned a J.D. and Ph.D. in history from Yale, where her doctoral dissertation received the George Washington Eggleston Prize and the Organization of American Historians’ Lerner-Scott Prize. 

Paula Monopoli (Maryland)

Paula Monopoli is Professor of Law and Marbury Research Professor at the University of Maryland School of Law, where she founded the Women, Leadership & Equality Program. Professor Monopoli received a B.A, cum laude, from Yale College in 1980, and a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law in 1983. She teaches Property, Trusts & Estates and a seminar in Gender and Leadership. Her publications include Gender and Constitutional Design in the Yale Law Journal, Gender and Justice in the Georgetown Journal of Gender and Law and a book on the intellectual history of the probate reform movement, AMERICAN PROBATE: PROTECTING THE PUBLIC, IMPROVING THE PROCESS (Northeastern University Press 2003). Professor Monopoli speaks often on the intersection of gender and the law. She is an elected member of the American Law Institute and an Academic Fellow of the American College of Trust & Estate Counsel. Professor Monopoli was the 2004 Outstanding Professor of the Year at Maryland.
 

Deborah Moss-West (Santa Clara)

Deborah Moss-West received her J.D. from Santa Clara Law in 1994 and has been Assistant Director at the Center for Social Justice and Public Service since fall 2008. The Center provides students with a legal education that instills a commitment to social justice, public interest, and public service. 

Prior to joining Santa Clara Law, Ms. Moss-West worked at the East Bay Community Law Center (EBCLC) for eight years, serving as Deputy Director and Development Officer. Ms. Moss-West was a frequent contributor to EBCLC’s clinical companion course, Community Law Practice, taught at Berkeley Law, and currently teaches in the Paralegal Program at Merritt College. During her career, Ms. Moss-West has held various positions at Allstate Insurance Company and AT&T/SBC in the areas of Human Resources, Civil Litigation, and Contracting.

Ms. Moss-West is passionate about bringing resources to underserved communities both through her work at Santa Clara Law and with other non-profit groups. Ms. Moss-West provides non-profit and small business consulting services and organizes community events and legal educational forums through her local church. In April 2009, Ms. Moss-West was selected as a participant in the Grassroots Institute for Fundraising Training’s (GIFT) distinguished Training-for-Trainers. GIFT teaches fundraising skills to non-profit organizations from a political framework that underscores the role that the community plays in building strong organizations and a strong social justice movement. Ms. Moss-West has served on a number of non-profit boards, and is currently a Board Member of Eden Information and Referral, Inc.
 

Professor Catherine Sandoval

Catherine Sandoval is an Associate Professor of Law at Santa Clara University. She teaches Communications Law, Antitrust, and Contracts. She is co-authoring a casebook on Communications Law with Professor Allen Hammond IV and Professor Len Baynes, to be published by Aspen Publishers. She published a study in 2009 on the status of minority-owned commercial radio stations, finding a strong nexus between minority station ownership and minority-oriented program content.

Prior to her appointment at Santa Clara University, Professor Sandoval served for three years as the Undersecretary and Staff Director of the State of California’s Business, Transportation and Housing Agency. Previously, she was the Vice-President and General Counsel of a Spanish-language broadcasting company, Z-Spanish Media Corporation. For nearly six years Professor Sandoval was a senior official at the FCC and was the Director of the FCC’s Office of Communications Business Opportunities. At the Law Offices of Munger, Tolles & Olson, Professor Sandoval was a litigation associate. Professor Sandoval clerked for Judge Dorothy W. Nelson on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Elizabeth M. Schneider (Brooklyn)

Elizabeth M. Schneider is the Rose L. Hoffer Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School, and has also been Visiting Professor of Law at Columbia and Harvard Law Schools. Professor Schneider teaches and writes in the fields of federal civil litigation, gender, law and domestic violence. She is the co-editor of WOMEN AND THE LAW STORIES (Foundation Press, forthcoming 2010) (with Stephanie M. Wildman), and is the author of BATTERED WOMEN AND FEMINIST LAWMAKING (Yale University Press 2000), which won the 2000 Association of American Publishers Professional-Scholarly Publishing Award in Law, co-author of the law school casebook DOMESTIC VIOLENCE AND THE LAW: THEORY AND PRACTICE (Foundation Press, 2nd ed. 2008) (with Cheryl Hanna, Judith G. Greenberg and Clare Dalton). Her most recent law review articles are: The Changing Shape of Federal Pretrial Practice: The Disparate Impact on Civil Rights and Employment Discrimination Cases, 158 U. PA. L. REV. 517 (2010); Domestic Violence Law Reform in the Twenty-First Century: Looking Back and Forward, 42 FAM. L.Q. 353 (2008); and The Dangers of Summary Judgment: Gender and Federal Civil Litigation, 59 RUTGERS L. REV.705 (2007). She is a member of the American Law Institute, and a frequent commentator for both print and broadcast media, and has been Chair of the Judicial-Academic Network of the National Association of Women Judges (NAWJ). She lectures widely in the United States and abroad on issues of gender and law, and was a consultant for the Secretary-General's In-Depth Study of All Forms of Violence Against Women, presented to the United Nations General Assembly in 2006. Professor Schneider graduated from Bryn Mawr College cum laude with Honors in Political Science, was a Leverhulme Fellow at The London School of Economics and Political Science where she received an M.Sc. in Political Sociology, and has a J.D. from New York University Law School, where she was an Arthur Garfield Hays Civil Liberties Fellow. She clerked for the late United States District Judge Constance Baker Motley of the Southern District of New York.

Stephanie M. Wildman (Santa Clara)

Stephanie M. Wildman received the 2007 Great Teacher Award from the Society of American Law Teachers, the largest national organization of law school faculty. She was the founding director of the Center for Social Justice at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall). She taught for 25 years at the University of San Francisco School of Law. She received her A.B. (1970) and her J.D. (1973) from Stanford University. She clerked for Judge Charles M. Merrill of the United States Court of Appeal for the Ninth Circuit and worked as a staff attorney for California Rural Legal Assistance. In 1983 she was elected to membership in the American Law Institute. She has been a visiting professor at U.C. Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall), U.C. Davis School of Law, Hastings College of the Law, Santa Clara University School of Law, and Stanford Law School.

Professor Wildman’s book, PRIVILEGE REVEALED: HOW INVISIBLE PREFERENCE UNDERMINES AMERICA, (with contributions by Margalynne Armstrong, Adrienne D. Davis, & Trina Grillo) won the 1997 Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Meyers Center for Human Rights. Her books, RACE AND RACES: CASES AND RESOURCES FOR A DIVERSE AMERICA 2d (with Richard Delgado, Angela A. Harris, and Juan F. Perea) (2007) and SOCIAL JUSTICE: PROFESSIONALS COMMUNITIES AND LAW (with MARTHA R. Martha R. Mahoney and John O. Calmore) (2003) are popular Thomson-West textbooks. She also contributed to MASTERING TORT LAW: CASES, PERSPECTIVES, AND PROBLEMS (with Nicolas P. Terry, Frank L. Maraist, Frank Mcclellan, Thomas C. Galligan, Jr., Phoebe A. Haddon, and Michael Rustad)(2007). She is past co-president of the Society of American Law Teachers and served on the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Executive Committee. Professor Wildman teaches Law and Social Justice, Gender and Law, and Torts. Her scholarship emphasizes systems of privilege, gender, race, and classroom dynamics.