George Barrett Social Justice Program

Ms. Kotagal is a highly acclaimed employment and civil rights litigator and partner with the plaintiffs’ firm Cohen Milstein. She represents women and other disenfranchised people in employment and civil rights class actions, often involving cutting-edge issues related to the Title VII, Equal Pay Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, Family Medical Leave Act, as well as wage and hour issues.  She is also the co-author of the Inclusion Rider. Ms. Kotagal was nominated by President Biden in April 2022 for Commissioner on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Aisha McWeay is a career public defender who currently serves as executive director at Still She Rises Tulsa, a legal nonprofit based in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that focuses exclusively on representing mothers in the criminal and civil legal systems. Before joining Still She Rises in 2019, Professor McWeay worked with the Nashville Defenders, where she rose from assistant public defender to general sessions division chief and ultimately to deputy public defender.

At Still She Rises, Professor McWeay leads a team that includes criminal, civil and family defense attorneys, investigators, attorneys focused on impact litigation, and client advocates. She also serves in a number of training and mentoring capacities to support indigent defense and community organizations nationally. She was honored in 2017 for her career contributions to indigent defense with the Gideon’s Promise Stephen B. Bright Award.

Nina Perales is vice president of Lltigation for MALDEF, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. In that role, she supervises the legal staff and litigation docket in MALDEF’s offices throughout the United States. Perales is best known for her work in voting rights, including redistricting and vote dilution cases. Her litigation has included successful statewide redistricting cases in Texas and Arizona as well as LULAC v. Perry (2006), a Voting Rights Act challenge to Texas congressional redistricting which Perales led through trial and argued successfully in the U.S. Supreme Court.

She also led the challenge under the National Voter Registration Act to an Arizona voter law and secured a favorable ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court in Arizona v. ITCA (2013). In addition, Perales specializes in immigrants’ rights litigation, including leading the case striking down an anti-immigrant housing ordinance in Farmers Branch, Texas.

Jameel Jaffer is the executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Prior to joining the Knight Institute, he was deputy legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union and director of the ACLU’s Center for Democracy, where he oversaw the ACLU’s work relating to free speech, privacy, technology, national security, and international human rights.

The George Barrett Social Justice Program welcomed Ahilan Arulanantham as the 2017-18 George Barrett Distinguished Practitioner in Residence on Tuesday, January 30, 2018.
Reflecting on his own family history and his career at the ACLU, Ahilan discussed lessons learned from his work representing immigrants for the last 15 years. Among other topics, he talked of his experiences with individuals detained in New York after 9/11, his litigation on behalf of Central American children, and his advocacy on behalf of detained immigrants at the Supreme Court.

Derwyn Bunton is the chief district defender for Orleans Parish (New Orleans), Louisiana, where he leads the Orleans Public Defenders Office, which represents the vast majority of persons charged with crimes – misdemeanors, felonies, and capital offenses – in Orleans Parish. Bunton delivered a talk focusing on the challenges of on-the-ground defense work. In his talk, "Public Defense in an Era of Mass Incarceration," drawing connections between the daily struggle to provide indigent clients with the competent defense the constitution requires and the reality of skyrocketing caseloads and overcrowded prisons.

Stephen A. Sanders '78, the 2015 Social Justice Fellow and director of the Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center, delivered a talk about his work with the ACLC. His talk focused on his work representing Kentucky coal miners seeking in cases involving black lung disease, caused by inhaling coal dust over a long period of time. His talk addressed the case of Gary Fox, a now-deceased coal miner whose claim for federal disability benefits was denied twice. The Fox case was among those featured in a Pulitzer Prize-winning series by the nonprofit Center for Public Integrity, "Breathless and Burdened: Dying from Black Lung, Buried by Law and Medicine," which alleged that coal industry lawyers and doctors had colluded to block disabled miners from receiving federal black lung benefits.

As Director of the LGBT and AIDS Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, James Esseks, the 2014 Social Justice Fellow, has helped shape the legal strategy that in the space of just over a decade has moved LGBT persons from extreme subordination to the brink of full legal equality. With US v. Windsor, the 2013 landmark case striking down crucial portions of the federal Defense of Marriage Act, he achieved the win of a lifetime — a victory that immediately and dramatically changed the lives of all LGBT Americans, the ripple effects of which promise to be even more transformative.

Oona Chatterjee, associate director of New York City Organizing with the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University, visited VLS in February as the 2013 Social Justice Fellow. In her lecture, "The Young Lawyer as Social Justice Entrepreneur," Chatterjee examined the critical role that lawyers play in building organized power in low-income communities.

Stephen B. Bright is president and senior counsel of the Southern Center for Human Rights and teaches at Yale Law School. He served as director of the Center from 1982 through 2005, and has been in his present position since the start of 2006. He has taught at Yale since 1993. 

Cecilia Wang, who is the Director of the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project, was Vanderbilt's inaugural Social Justice Fellow in 2011. Wang spent several days at the law school meeting with students and sharing her experiences as a social justice attorney.