EJS President Eva Paterson, EJS Board Chair Kate Kendell, and our board of directors welcome two new board members: Priscilla Ocen, Associate Professor of Law at Loyola Law School, and Jayashri Srikantiah, Professor of Law and Director of Stanford Law School’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic.
Professor Priscilla Ocen‘s work examines the relationship between race and gender identities and punishment. Prior to joining the faculty at Loyola, Professor Ocen served as the Critical Race Studies Law Fellow at UCLA. While at UCLA she developed a project that examined conditions of confinement within women’s prisons and the race and gender implications of the use of practices such as shackling during labor and childbirth.
Professor Ocen graduated magna cum laude from San Diego State University with a BA in African American Studies and Political Science. Thereafter, she received her JD from UCLA School of Law with a specialization in Critical Race Studies. Upon graduation, Professor Ocen clerked for the Honorable Eric L. Clay of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Detroit, Michigan. Following her clerkship, Professor Ocen served as the Thurgood Marshall Fellow at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, where she litigated in the areas of voting rights, affirmative action, school desegregation, police misconduct and spearheaded the development of a Black Women’s Reentry Project.
An experienced clinical teacher and lawyer, Professor Jayashri Srikantiah is the founder and director of Stanford Law School’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic. She and students in the clinic have represented scores of immigrant survivors of domestic violence and immigrants facing removal because of past criminal convictions. Prof. Srikantiah is a frequent speaker on various immigration topics, including comprehensive immigration reform, immigration and national security, and immigration detention.
Before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 2004, Professor Srikantiah was the associate legal director of the ACLU of Northern California and a staff attorney at the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project. Professor Srikantiah has also worked as an associate at the law firm of Howard Rice Nemerovski Canady Falk & Rabkin, and was a law clerk to Judge David R. Thompson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Prof. Srikantiah received her undergraduate degree from University of California, Berkeley, and her law degree from New York University School of Law.
Professors Ocen and Srikantiah join our existing board members: Kate Kendell, Executive Director, National Center for Lesbian Rights (EJS Board Chair); John Bonifaz, Co-Founder and Director, Free Speech For People; Dorothy M. Ehrlich, Deputy Executive Director, National American Civil Liberties Union;Raymond C. Marshall, Partner, Bingham McCutchen LLP; Eva Paterson, EJS President; Mona Tawatao, Senior Attorney, Western Center on Law and Poverty; and Tobias Wolff, Professor of Law, University of Pennsylvania Law School.