Elvia R. Arriola is a Latina, feminist critical legal theorist. Her J.D. is from UC Berkeley and she has an M.A. in History from New York University. She was formerly a staff attorney with the National Headquarters of the American Civil Liberties Union and an Assistant Attorney General in the New York State Department of Law. She began her law teaching career in 1991 at the University of Texas at Austin. Arriola taught civil rights, employment law, family law and feminist legal theory at the UT Law School from 1991-1999. In 1997, at a time when the University of Texas was under extensive public scrutiny over the impact of Hopwood v. Texas (5th Cir, 1996.) which abolished affirmative action in admissions, Professor Arriola developed a pedagogical experiment with her students enrolled in a course called Civil Rights Litigation that questioned the relationship between poor performance by students of color in standardized tests like the LSAT and distribution of education resources in the public schools. This project was coined the Austin Schools Project.

Arriola has served as a visiting professor at St. Mary’s University and De Paul University in Chicago. As a 2001 Humanities Fellow at De Paul University she produced, in collaboration with the American Friends Service Committee, a conference on cross-border trade, the Mexican maquiladoras and the global economy. In the Fall 2001 she will join the faculty of Northern Illinois University as an Associate Professor of Law. She may be reached at Elvia@texas.net

Lisa Brodoff is a clinical law professor at Seattle University School of Law, where she teaches courses and clinics in Elder Law, Administrative Law, Trusts and Estates, and Special Education. Prior to her teaching position, she was the Chief Administrative Law Judge for the Washington State Office of Administrative Hearings, Chief Review Judge for the Department of Social and Health Services, and a Staff Attorney at Puget Sound Legal Assistance Foundation (now Columbia Legal Services) for 13 years, practicing in the areas of Elder Law and Public Benefits. Professor Brodoff is also a Tribal Court Judge for the Northwest Intertribal Court System. She and her partner of 20 years, Lynn Grotsky, are the parents of two children, daughter Evan, 14 years old, and son Micha, 11 years old. They were co-petitioners in Washington State’s first successful second parent adoption case. Their family’s story has been featured in Ms Magazine, LIFE magazine, the Seattle Times and the Seattle Post Intelligencer. During her off hours, Lisa sings, plays bass, and writes music for the band, The Righteous Mothers.

Kim Brooks joined the Faculty of Law at Queen’s University in July 2001 after completing her LL.M. at Osgoode Hall Law School and her LL.B. at the University of British Columbia Faculty of Law. Her teaching and research interests include tax law and policy, and tort law.

Susan B. Boyd joined the Faculty of Law, in 1992 as the first incumbent of the Chair in Feminist Legal Studies. She is also Director of the Centre for Feminist Legal Studies at UBC. She taught previously at Carleton University's Department of Law in Ottawa. She teaches Feminist Legal Studies at both LL.B. and LL.M. levels as well as Family Law, and Women, Law & Family. She researches and publishes in the fields of feminist legal theory, child custody law, privatization trends in family law, and family law and sexual identity. Her book Child Custody, Law, and Women's Work was published in 2002. She also published Challenging the Public/Private Divide: Feminism, Law, and Public Policy in 1997, and Canadian Feminist Literature on Law: An Annotated Bibliography in 1999. She has developed initiatives to introduce gender issues into the law school curriculum at UBC.

Professor Boyd has been on the Editorial Board of the Canadian Journal of Women and the Law since 1986 and is on the Advisory Board of the Feminist Institute for Studies in Law and Society of Simon Fraser University. She has worked on interventions at the Supreme Court of Canada by LEAF (the Women's Legal Education and Action Fund) in cases related to child custody and lesbian claims to spousal status. She has also been involved with law reform initiatives in the field of child custody law.

Devon Carbado teaches Constitutional Criminal Procedure, Constitutional Law, Critical Race Theory, and Criminal Adjudication. He was elected Professor of the Year by the UCLA School of Law Class of 2000 and was recently awarded the Distinguished Alumni Award from Harvard Law School's Black Law Students Association.

Professor Carbado writes in the areas of critical race theory, employment discrimination, criminal procedure, constitutional law, and identity, and is currently studying African-American responses to the internment of Japanese Americans. He is the Director of the Critical Race Studies Concentration at the Law School and a faculty associate of the Center for African American Studies.

Originally from New York City and Normandy, France, Aline Carton is a community organizer and progressive/radical activist fighting for social/economic justice and social change. Organizing across communities,Aline has been working for queer people’s rights, tenants’ rights, labor rights for non-profit workers, women’s rights, economic/educational justice for students and in the movements against sexual/domestic violence and white privilege/supremacy. Recognizing that social justice movements need to create concrete improvements in oppressed people’s lives while working for radical social change and liberation, Aline is studying law at Seattle University School of Law. She will be concentrating her studies in poverty/inequality law and international human rights to further her work as a community organizer.

Adrienne Davis is a Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago Law School. Her permanent appointment is at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she joined the faculty in July 2000 as a Professor of Law. From 1994 until 2000 she was a professor and Co-Director of the Gender, Work, & Family Project at the Washington College of Law at American University. Prior to that, she taught law for three years in California. She has been a Visiting Professor at Cornell Law School and a Visiting Fellow in the Princeton History Department. Professor Davis’s scholarship emphasizes the gendered dimensions of American slavery, including the regulation of sexuality under slavery, and its on-going implications for law and social norms. She also does work on theories of commodification. She is the recipient of a grant from the Ford Foundation to research meanings and representations of Black women and labor and was a Resident Fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study and Conference Center. She was a Distinguished Visitor at University of Toronto, the Dean’s Distinguished Lecturer in Race and Legal History at Vanderbilt Law School, and a Scholar-in-Residence in the George Mason African-American Studies Department. She teaches property, contracts, and a variety of advanced legal theory courses, including courses on feminist legal theory, law and literature, race and the law, and reparations.

Professor Davis is active in academic organizations and legal practice. Professor Davis is a member of the boards of the Center of the Study for the American South and the Cultural Studies Program at the University of North Carolina and is on the editorial board of the Law & History Review. She is a former editor of the Journal of Legal Education and past chair of the Law & Humanities Section of the American Association of Law Schools. She is a consultant with a litigation project seeking reparations for African-Americans and is a lecturer with BARBRI-Nile. She is a frequent lecturer on the topic of legal history and legal theory, race and gender.

Paula Ettelbrick
Professor of Law
University of Michigan, NYU, Columbia, and Wayne State law schools
 

Since leaving the Policy Institute in December 2001 Paula is spending the year teaching Sexuality and the Law at University of Michigan, NYU, Columbia, and Wayne State University law schools and at Barnard College. In addition, she is teaching a new seminar this Fall on Marital and Non-Marital Family Structures at Columbia Law School. For more than 15 years she has worked nationally as a lawyer and policy advocate on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues as the legal director of Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, the policy director for the National Center for Lesbian Rights, and the legislative counsel for the Empire State Pride Agenda. She has spoken and written extensively on a range of legal and policy issues of concern to lesbians and gay men, in particular in the area of family law and policy.

Joan W. Howarth is Professor of Law at the Boyd School of Law, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Prior to joining the UNLV faculty in 2001 she was on the faculty of Golden Gate University, and visited at Hastings College of Law, University of California, Davis, and University of California, Berkeley. Much of her scholarship concerns capital punishment, especially gender and the death penalty. She has also written on lesbian legal history, representations of women defenders, and the corrosive impact of bar exams on legal education. She practiced law with the ACLU Foundation of Southern California prior to becoming a fulltime academic in 1989.

Lara Karaian is currently an Ph.D. Candidate in Women's Studies at York University in Toronto, Canada. Lara would love to have gone to law school and become a lawyer but her irrational fear of standardized testing (read LSAT) has propelled her in another equally rewarding direction. In her Doctoral studies most of her work focuses on the debates within and across Postmodern, Queer and Feminist Legal Theory in the Canadian context. Lara is particularly interested in Supreme Court cases coming out of challenges to the s.15 Sex Equality provision in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and more recently cases coming out of Human Rights Tribunals. Lara is Co-Editor of the book Turbo Chicks: Talking Young Feminisms, the first Canadian anthology on young women and feminism. She is also one of the contributers in the Encyclopedia of Feminist Theories Edited by Lorraine Code. Her most recent projects include helping organize a conference on the human rights violations of women in Afghanistan and two conferences on the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). Currently she is working as a teaching assistant in an introductory women's studies course but prior to that she TAed for three years for a course on women and the law. Lara completed her M.A. in Women's Studies at York and her Undergraduate Honours B.A. in Criminology and Sociology at the University of Toronto. She can be reached at lkaraian@yorku.ca

Andrew Koppelman, who joined the law school faculty in fall 1997, is an expert in constitutional law and political philosophy. His current research focuses on the constitutional rights of lesbians and gay men. EDUCATION: AB, University of Chicago; MA, JD, PhD, Yale University. PAST APPOINTMENTS: visiting assistant professor of law, University of Texas at Austin, 1997; assistant professor of politics, Princeton University, 1992-97; law clerk, Chief Justice Ellen A. Peters, Connecticut Supreme Court, 1991-92; professional staff member specializing in product liability reform, U.S. Senate Commerce Committee, Subcommittee on the Consumer, 1986-87. SELECTED PUBLICATIONS: Antidiscrimination Law and Social Equality, Yale University Press; "Why Discrimination against Lesbians and Gay Men Is Sex Discrimination, " New York University Law Review; "Forced Labor: A Thirteenth-Amendment Defense of Abortion," Northwestern University Law Review; "Sex Equality and/or the Family: From Bloom vs. Okin to Rousseau vs. Hegel," Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, "The Gay Rights Question in Contemporary American Law" (University of Chicago Press, 2002).

Professor Peter Kwan was born in what was then known as the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong. He studied law and philosophy at the University of Sydney where he completed his bachelor and master degrees in law (magna cum laude), and where he received the Emma and Gustav Bondy Postgraduate Prize in Jurisprudence. He practiced as a corporate attorney before earning a Master of Laws at Columbia University School of Law in New York. At Columbia, he was a member of the Student Senate and worked as an associate and articles editor on the Journal of Transnational Law and as articles editor on the Journal of Chinese Law.

While in Australia, Prof. Kwan was an executive board member of the Australian Chinese Community Association.

In the United States, Prof. Kwan has participated in four Critical Race Theory Workshops. He has spoken at many conferences and delivered scholarly papers in the area of Critical Race Theory and in Law and Sexual Orientation. He has written and published in these areas, as well as having assisted in the publication of the Critical Race Theory Reader. He was an organizing committee member of the Critical Race Theory Conference held at Yale Law School in 1997. In his writing and in his speaking engagements, Prof. Kwan has been recently engaged in Asian Pacific American Legal Scholarship and organized the first Asian Pacific American Legal Scholarship Workshop in July 1999. Together with Professor Robert Chang, he organized the second APA Legal Scholarship Workshop in July 2001. He has been for two years the chair of the Individual Rights and Constitutional Law Committee of the Santa Clara Bar Association and also chaired its Immigration Law Committee. He served as Chair of the Association of American Law Schools Section on Law and the Humanities and is the Chair-elect of the AALS Section on Gay and Lesbian Legal Issues.

At Santa Clara University, Prof. Kwan served as faculty advisor to its Asian Pacific Law Students Association and the Bisexual, Gay and Lesbian Advocates.

His teaching areas include Contracts, Constitutional Law, Jurisprudence, Critical Race Theory, Comparative Law and Asian Americans and the Law. He also has taught as a lecturer at Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California, Berkeley.

Prof. Kwan is a recipient of the Distinguished Services Award from the Minorities Section of the Association of American Law Schools.

Prof. Kwan is currently teaching as a visitor at the University of Hong Kong Department of Law.

Professor LaViolette joined the teaching staff of the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa in 1998. Her research is devoted mainly to international human rights, international humanitarian law, and the rights of refugees. She is also interested in lesbian and gay legal issues and feminist international legal theory.

Professor LaViolette has several years of experience working as a legislative assistant in the House of Commons. In addition she has worked with governmental organizations like the Immigration and Refugee Board, and non-governmental organizations specializing in human rights and women’s issues. She was a law clerk for Madam Justice Alice Desjardins at the Federal Court of Appeal of Canada in 1996-97, before completing a graduate degree at Cambridge University in 1998.

Professor LaViolette teaches Family Law, Public International Law, and Conflicts of Laws.

Sheila Lee Mengert graduated from University of Puget Sound School of Law in 1988. Her previous education was at Seattle University graduating summa cum laude in Humanities and at the University of Washington where she obtained the degree of M.A. in English Literature. Her Master's essay was on James Joyce's epic, Finnegan's Wake. She writes and lectures on Systems Theory and its application to Jurisprudence. She also writes for the stage. Her work in the area of gender theory has resulted in a book that explores the politics of transsexualism and issues of spirituality for transgender persons.

Professor Millbank received her B.A, L.LB with honors from the university of Sydney and an L.LM from the University of British Columbia. She has taught courses in Legal Institutions, Contracts, and Law, Lawyers, and Justice. Most of her research to date has been in areas of family law and concerns questions of justice for women and for lesbians and gay men. She is currently engaged in research with Catherine Dauvergne concerning questions of identity in Australian and Canadian refugee claims on the basis of sexuality.

Jodi O’Brien is Associate Professor of Sociology at Seattle University. She teaches courses in sexuality, inequality, social psychology, and feminist theories. Her books include, The Production of Reality (Pine Forge Press), Everyday Inequalities (Basil Blackwell) and Social Prisms: Reflections on Everyday Myths and Paradoxes (Pine Forge Press). She is currently the Chair of the American Sociological Association Section on Sexualties.

Debra Parkes joined the Faculty of Law at the University of Manitoba in July 2001 after completing her LL.M. at Columbia Law School and her LL.B. at the University of British Columbia Faculty of Law. Her teaching and research interests include constitutional law, employment law, and penal law and policy.

Professor Marc Poirier teaches at the Seton Hall University School of Law in Newark, N.J., where he offers courses in environmental law, property, administrative law and law and sexuality. He serves as informal advisor to the formally non-existent lesbian and gay student group. He has published in the areas of gender discrimination, property rights and environmental regulation, environmental justice, coastal land use, and theory of interpretation. Professor Poirier has given papers on gender and sexual orientation issues at various academic and professional conferences, including the Law and Society Association, Cornell Law School’s Feminism and Legal Theory Workshop, and Brooklyn Law School’s Law and Cognitive Theory series. Among other civic activities, he has been a member of the steering committee of Diamond Metta Lesbian and Gay Buddhists of New York since 1994.

Prior to entering academia, Professor Poirier practiced law for twelve years in Washington, D.C., at the firm of Spiegel & McDiarmid, where he specialized in hydroelectric licensing, administrative law, and other electric utility, antitrust and environmental (water) matters. He holds a B.A. from Yale University, a J.D. from Harvard Law School and an LL.M. from Yale Law School.

Ruthann Robson is Professor of Law at City University of New York School of Law, teaching in the areas of constitutional law and sexuality and law, Her newest book of lesbian theory is Sappho Goes to Law School Columbia University Press, 1998) and her newest book of lesbian fiction is The Struggle for Happiness (St. Martin’s Press, 2000).

B.A. Wesleyan University 1977. J.D. magna cum laude University of Pennsylvania 1982. Associate editor University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Order of the Coif. Admitted to practice Pennsylvania and U.S. Supreme Court. Professor Shapiro has served as a sole practitioner with emphasis on civil and constitutional rights, AIDS discrimination, and police misconduct, and has experience at both trial and appellate levels. She also has been a partner in a small civil rights law firm with emphasis on police misconduct, constitutional and civil rights, civil RICO litigation, and criminal defense, and has served a clerkship with The Hon. Joseph S. Lord.

Nancy Shurtz is a professor of law at the University of Oregon School of Law and specializes in the taxation law field and has recently developed a Certificate Program in Taxation and states that her “principal goal is to continue the advance of our taxation program and provide expanded educational and professional opportunities for our students.” She has also developed a tax externship program at the Oregon Tax Court and the Internal Revenue Service. Prior to joining the faculty of the University of Oregon School of Law she taught at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in the Department of Legal Studies.

Nancy Shurtz is a prolific writer and has two books in progress; Environmental Policy: Marketplace Economics and Alternative Approaches, and Law and the Life Stages of Women. She has written many articles analyzing tax theory and tax policy and most recently how these topics relate to gender and environmental issues. In addition, she prepares a column quarterly for Estate Planning magazine in which she reviews current issues in Estate Planning.

Prof. Shurtz is frequently asked to speak at professional meetings and has given speeches on such topics as business and tax; environmental law as it relates to tax, estate planning, and women and the law.

A.B. Princeton University 1974, Woodrow Wilson School Scholar. J.D. Yale Law School 1978. Editor and note author Yale Law Journal. Following graduation, Professor Skover served as law clerk to Judge Jon O. Newman in the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut, and in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He is the co-author of a recent book on the obscenity arrests and free speech struggles of the comedian Lenny Bruce, entitled The Trials of Lenny Bruce. He is also the co-author of a critically acclaimed book on the pop culture of free speech, entitled The Death of Discourse, and an analysis of the form and structure of law’s rationality, Tactics of Legal Reasoning. Among numerous articles, Skover co-authored “The Pornographic State” for the Harvard Law Review; “Paratexts” and “Pissing in the Snow” for the Stanford Law Review; “Commerce & Communication” and “The First Amendment in an Age of Paratroopers” for the Texas Law Review; “The Future of Liberal Legal Scholarship” for Michigan Law Review; essays on the state action and the political question doctrines for the Encyclopedia of the American Constitution, and essays for such publications as The Nation. He is the founding co-editor of Books-on-Law, the first on-line, law-related book review service.

Judith Stacey is the Streisand Professor of Contemporary Gender Studies and Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California. Her research and teaching interests focus on the relationship between social change and the politics of gender, family, and sexuality. Currently she is conducting ethnographic research on gay male family and kinship relationships and values in Los Angeles. Her publications include In the Name of The Family: Rethinking Family Values in the Postmodern Age (Beacon Press 1996); Brave New Families: Stories of Domestic Upheaval in Late Twentieth Century America (University of California Press 1998); and "(How) Does the Sexual Orientation of Parents Matter?" (Co-author Timothy Biblarz), American Sociological Review, 66, n.2 (2001). She is a founding board member of the Council on Contemporary Families, a group committed to public education about research on family diversity.

Travis Taylor is a Civil Rights Investigator for the Seattle Office for Civil Rights (SOCR). Since joining SOCR in January 2001, he has investigated and settled many allegations of discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations. Travis has a passion for employment law and employment discrimination issues and is a resource on a variety of equal employment laws including Title VII, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, the Washington Law Against Discrimination, and the Seattle Municipal Code. Travis graduated with a B.A. from Western Washington University, earned his J.D. from Seattle University School of Law in 2001, and is a member of the Washington State Bar.

B.A. cum laude Indiana University 1982. J.D. summa cum laude Indiana University School of Law 1991. Editor-in-chief Indiana Law Journal. Order of the Coif; John H. Edwards Fellow; Indiana University Chancellor’s Scholar. Professor Testy also earned a graduate certificate in Women’s Studies at Indiana University during law school. Admitted to practice Illinois. Professor Testy has clerked for Judge Jesse E. Eschbach of the U.S. Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit. A former summer associate at the Chicago law firm of Kirkland & Ellis and at Ice Miller Donadio & Ryan in Indianapolis, she writes in the areas of business law and legal theory.

Dylan Vade is a trannyfag who believes that there are at least a zillion different genders. He is co-founder of the recently open Transgender Law Center located in San Francisco - his home forever. He just graduated from Stanford law school and has a Ph.D. in philosophy and women's studies from SUNY-Stony Brook.

Jim Wilets is a law professor at NSU Law Center in Fort Lauderdale, Florida and teaches human rights, comparative law, international law, constitutional law and international business transactions. He is also Executive Director of the Inter-American Center for Human Rights, a broad-based human rights consortium involving several universities and direct service providers in South Florida. He has written extensively on human rights and sexual orientation and his book, The Human Rights of Sexual Minorities: A Global View has been accepted for publication in fall, 2002. He has worked as an attorney for the International Human Rights Law Group in Romania and as a representative of the National Democratic Institution on a mission to Liberia. He prepared, at the request of the UN Secretary-General, the first two drafts of a proposal for reforming the human rights functions of the United Nations and assisted with drafting a proposed Basic Law for a future Palestinian state. He served on the Human Rights Advisory Committee of the International Tribunal on Human Rights Violations Against Sexual Minorities and has served as an expert witness in several cases involving refugees from Latin America applying for asylum based on sexual orientation.

Claire Young joined the Faculty of Law in 1992, having also taught for many years at the University of Western Ontario. Prior to teaching law, she worked in government. She teaches, researches and writes on all aspects of tax law and policy, and is currently engaged in work that focuses on women and tax. She recently completed a monograph commissioned by the Canadian federal government entitled Women, Tax and Social Programs: The Gendered Impact of Funding Social Programs Through the Tax System. Her other research interests include sexuality and the law and she has just completed a report for the Law Commission of Canada titled "What's Sex Got to Do With It? Tax and the 'Family'". In 1999 she was the Dunhill Madden Visiting Chair in Women and the Law at the University of Sydney, Australia. She was awarded the University Killam award for excellence in teaching in 1998 and 2002.