Volume 8, Issue 2, Spring/Summer 2010
Authors
Gabriel Arkles
Gabriel Arkles is a staff attorney at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, where he has provided legal services to hundreds of low-income transgender, intersex, and gender nonconforming people of color, concerning a range of survival-related legal issues. In order to advance the rights of these communities, he has been involved in impact litigation and policy work, including participating in a recent victory with New York's juvenile justice system. Over the years, he has been an advocate and activist around issues of gender, sexual orientation, and HIV/AIDS and, currently, his work focuses on advocating for the rights of community members imprisoned throughout New York State. His article, Safety and Solidarity Across Gender Lines: Rethinking the Segregation of Transgender People in Detention, appeared in the Temple Political & Civil Rights Law Review in 2009.
Kate Barth
Kate Barth is a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania School of Law, where she served as a senior editor on the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. Before coming to law school, Kate earned her master's degree in Development Studies at the London School of Economics, writing her dissertation on smart ways to introduce gender-balanced HIV/AIDS prevention programs. Internationally, Kate has also worked with the Gender Research and Advocacy Department of the Legal Assistance Centre-Namibia, where she published a report on the underage drinking laws, and with the Fundación para Estudio e Investigación de la Mujer in Argentina, where she researched gender-biased health laws. Stateside, Kate has worked as a job development trainer for ex-offenders in New York City, and with the Washington D.C., office of U.S. Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-R.I.). Kate will shortly be joining Allen & Overy LLP as an associate.
Margaret Chon
Margaret Chon is the Donald and Lynda Horowitz Professor for the Pursuit of Justice, the first endowed chair at Seattle University School of Law. Since joining the Seattle University faculty in 1996, she has been a dedicated teacher as well as a prolific scholar in both intellectual property and critical race theory. She is currently the associate dean for Research and Centers, responsible for nurturing the law school faculty's academic excellence and showcasing its rapidly growing scholarly reputation. Her current scholarship is a genre she characterizes as global intellectual property equality. Along with several co-authors, she is also working on a second edition of the textbook Race, Rights and Reparation: Law and the Japanese American Internment, to address post 9/11 challenges.
Eli Clare
White, disabled, and genderqueer, Eli Clare happily lives in the Green Mountains of Vermont where he writes and proudly claims a penchant for rabble-rousing. He has written a book of essays Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation (South End Press, 1999, 2009), a collection of poetry The Marrow's Telling: Words in Motion (Homofactus Press, 2007), and has been published in many periodicals and anthologies. Eli speaks, teaches, and facilitates all over the United States and Canada at conferences, community events, and colleges about disability, queer and trans identities, and social justice. Among other pursuits, he has walked across the United States for peace, coordinated a rape prevention program, and helped organize the first ever Queerness and Disability Conference.
Lucas Crawford
Lucas Cassidy Crawford is a PhD student in English and film Studies at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. Lucas studies modernist fiction, modernist architecture, and transgender. Lucas thanks the Social and Sciences Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Killam Trust, and the Trudeau Foundation for their support.
Jack Darcher
Jack Darcher is a 2010 JD candidate at the Seattle University School of Law, where he serves as an Article Editor for the Seattle Journal for Social Justice. He received a double BA in English literature and political science from Washington University in St. Louis in 2004, with a minor in humanities. Since then, Jack has served as an investigative enforcement intern at the Seattle field office for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and as a law clerk for the Washington State Human Rights Commission. He is currently engaged in a semester as a judicial extern for Judge Mary Yu at the King County Superior Court. He plans to focus his career on employment, immigration, and family law.
Masen Davis
Masen Davis is the Executive Director of the Transgender Law Center (TLC), a multidisciplinary civil rights organization advocating for transgender communities. Prior to coming to TLC in 2007, Masen worked at United Way of Greater Los Angeles where he led a countywide afterschool initiative and directed development activities.
Masen has been an activist in the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community since 1998. His experience includes advocating for survivors of violence; fostering leadership development programs for transgender communities; and leading grassroots advocacy organizations. He has served in leadership roles for many organizations, including the boards of FTM Alliance of Los Angeles, City of West Hollywood's Transgender Task Force, National Center for Transgender Equality, and Funders for LGBTQ Issues.
A social worker by training, his writing has been published in various publications, including Sexual Orientation and Gender Expression in Social Work Practice: Working with Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender People and New Directors in Student Services. Masen received his masters of social welfare from UCLA, and BA from Northwestern University.
Phil Duran
OutFront Minnesota legal director Phil Duran has served in his current capacity since 2000. His prior experience includes work with the Minnesota AIDS Project and the Chicago office of Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund. Phil holds his law degree from the University of Minnesota and his undergraduate degree from Michigan State University.
Phil previously served on the board of the Minnesota Lavender Bar Association and as a member of both the executive council of the Minnesota State Bar Association and the Minneapolis Civil Rights Commission. Phil received a Community Service Award in 1997 from the Human Rights Campaign for his work in his native Michigan. He is currently a member of the Minnesota Supreme Court's Gender Fairness Implementation Committee.
As OutFront Minnesota's Legal Director, Phil focuses on legal information, referral, and education; state legislative research and analysis; state administrative agency and local government public policy; school-related issues; and direct representation in selected public assistance and human rights cases.
Pooja Gehi
Pooja Gehi, Esq., is a queer, South Asian woman who began working at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP) in November, 2005. At SRLP, Pooja is a member of the direct service team on which she represents low-income and/or of color transgender, intersex, and gender nonconforming people in the areas of immigration, attaining appropriate identification, attaining benefits, Medicaid, name changes, and discrimination. Pooja is also a member of SRLP's collective development team where she works on the internal health of the collective, developing its members, strengthening collective process, and organizing trainings, retreats, and volunteer orientations.
Christoph Hanssmann
Christoph Hanssmann is a health educator currently working at Seattle Children's Hospital. He graduated from the University of Washington School of Public Health and Community Medicine in 2006. Chris has lived in Seattle for more than 10 years, and in that time has been involved in a variety of community organizing projects and trainings. Many of these have focused on topics of LGBQ and trans health in the context of social, economic, and racial justice. He is also engaged in building frameworks for participatory research that increase communities' self-determination and access to resources.
Huy Nguyen
Huy Nguyen has worked as a staff attorney with the Northwest Justice Project since 2000. He has specialized in public benefits issues (including Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Basic Food, Medicaid, & Long Term Care benefits) since 2004. Prior to this, he provided legal services to low-income clients on a variety of civil legal issues including housing, consumer, and family law with the Coordinated Legal Education Advice and Referral (CLEAR) phone intake line. He obtained his J.D. from the University of Washington, School of Law (2000).
Mae Quinn
Mae C. Quinn is a Professor of Law at Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, where she co-directs the Civil Justice Clinic and focuses on youth advocacy. A former New York City public defender and law Clerk to the Honorable Jack B. Weinstein, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, Professor Quinn previously taught in the clinical programs at the University of Tennessee College of Law (associate professor) and Georgetown University Law Center (E. Barrett Prettyman Teaching Fellow). At work on a book project, Feminist Legal Realism? Realistic Women on the Benches, in the Trenches and Beyond, she is interested in exploring parallels between past and present criminal court reform movements, as well as examining the law as lived by marginalized communities, individuals, and other legal outsiders. Her past work addressing various legal, ethical, and other issues facing accused persons and their lawyers has been published in various journals including the Washington and Lee Law Review, Boston College Law Review, and New York University Review of Law and Social Change.
Elana Redfield
Elana Redfield joined the Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP) as a staff attorney in May of 2009. In her professional capacity, she assists SRLP community members with name changes, changing identity documentation, confronting discrimination in sex-segregated facilities such as foster care and homeless shelters, navigating immigration law and enforcement, and accessing welfare, Medicaid, and other public benefits. Prior to joining the SRLP staff, Elana worked with defendants in the criminal justice system, represented immigrants fighting deportation proceedings, and served as a long-time volunteer with the SRLP Collective Development Team.
Jennifer Segadelli
Jennifer Segadelli is a 2010 JD candidate at the Seattle University School of Law. Born and raised in Seattle, Washington, she received her BA in Communication Studies and Public Relations from Carroll College in Helena, Montana, in 2006. At Seattle University School of Law, Ms. Segadelli was a member of the Public Interest Law Foundation and served as a Student Fellow for the Center for Global Justice. Her experience studying and working abroad in South Africa and Uganda sparked her passion in international law, human rights advocacy, and international criminal law, and in January 2010, led her to an internship with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague, Netherlands. Ms. Segadelli plans to pursue a career abroad in international criminal law and human rights advocacy, but hopes to one day return to the classroom as a professor of law.
Dean Spade
Dean Spade is an assistant professor at Seattle University School of Law, teaching Administrative Law, Poverty Law, Law and Social Movements, and Critical Perspectives in Transgender Law. In 2002, Dean founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project (www.srlp.org), a nonprofit law collective that provides free legal services to transgender, intersex, and gender non-conforming people who are low-income and/or people of color. SRLP also engages in litigation, policy reform, and public education on issues affecting these communities and operates on a collective governance model, prioritizing the governance and leadership of trans, intersex, and gender variant people of color. Dean was recently awarded a Dukeminier Award for his 2008 article "Documenting Gender" and the 2009-2010 Haywood Burns Chair at CUNY Law School, and was selected to give the 2009-2010 James A. Thomas Lecture at Yale.
Sean Walsh
Sean Walsh has worked at the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) since May 2007. He holds a BA (2004) and MA (2005) in economics from the University of Waterloo where his major fields of study included labor and environmental economics. In the past, Sean has worked with numerous professors at the University of Waterloo and is currently working as John Whalley and Manmohan Agarwal's research assistant at CIGI working on such topics as climate change negotiations, international institutional architecture, and trade. Another topic being researched is the rising power of developing nations in the global economy, China and India in particular.
Daniel Watts
Daniel Watts is a 2010 JD candidate at the Seattle University School of Law and a content editor for the Seattle Journal for Social Justice. He received his BA in American Literature from Bard College, in 2000. Mr. Watts has experience organizing health care unions, both as a rank-and-file employee and as an organizer. Mr. Watts was attracted to the practice of law because of his profound desire to advance social justice. He intends to practice environmental and Indian law. He would like to thank his teachers, Catherine O'Neill, Mark Chinen, and Jacqueline Hand for their guidance and scholarship; his mother, Kelly Watts, for teaching him to love writing; and his wife, Dana Aldis-Watts, for her love and partnership.
Kristina Wertz
Kristina Wertz is the Legal Director of the Transgender Law Center (TLC), a multidisciplinary civil rights organization advocating for transgender communities. Kristina provides legal counsel to transgender people and their families and technical assistance to lawyers assisting transgender clients. She oversees the TLC's public policy advocacy programs, including economic justice, health care access, student safety, and leadership development. Kristina regularly conducts trainings for community members, employers, attorneys, social service providers, health care providers, and other professionals. She is a co-author of the ground breaking book Immigration and the Transgender Client.
Prior to her role as legal director of the TLC, Kristina practiced as a civil rights litigator for people with disabilities, workers, victims of domestic violence, renters, and recipients of public benefits. Kristina has a BA from New York University and a JD from Brooklyn Law School. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of Bay Area Lawyers for Individual Freedom, the Bay Area's LGBT bar association.
John Whalley
Professor John Whalley is a distinguished fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), Waterloo, Ontario. He is also a research associate of NBER (Cambridge, US), joint coordinator of the global economy area for CESifo (Germany) and professor of economics at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. He is as well a Fellow of the Econometric Society, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a Foreign Fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences. He is internationally known for his work in several diverse areas of economics. He was a founder of applied general equilibrium analysis in the 1970s building on his Yale thesis work, and became an expert on World Trade Organization issues, development strategies and tax policy. His recent work focuses on China, Russia, and climate change. On a personal level, he is committed to the position that wit and humor lighten life's path.
