Moderators:

• Adrieannette Ciccone, Chair, CLA Litigation Section
• Mary McKelvey, Shareholder, Polsinelli,
• Megan Rowe, Partner, DSR Health Law

Speakers:

• Ederlina Co, Associate Professor, University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law
• Tristin Green, Associate Dean for Research, Professor of Law, William M. Rains Fellow
• Diana Kasdan, Legal and Policy Director for the Center on Reproductive Health, Law, and Policy at UCLA Law
• Margaret Russell, Associate Professor, Santa Clara University School of Law

Professor Ederlina Co teaches Global Lawyering Skills I and II, the Prisoner Civil Rights Mediation Clinic, and Reproductive Rights and Justice.

Professor Co’s research is focused on issues that arise in the area of reproductive rights and justice. Her article Abortion Privilege was published by the Rutgers Law Review in 2021, and she is a contributing author to Feminist Judgments: Reproductive Justice Rewritten published by Cambridge Press in 2020. Professor Co has also published works related to equity in legal education, alternative dispute resolution, and cultural competency in the legal profession.

In 2022, Professor Co received Pacific’s Woman of Distinction Award as well as the Hether C. Macfarlane Teaching Innovation Award. She was also recognized as Faculty Member of the Year by the Public Legal Services Society. In 2020, Professor Co received the Julie A. Davies Professor of the Year Award.

Prior to joining the McGeorge faculty, Professor Co spent nearly a decade clerking for the Honorable Dale A. Drozd at the United States District Court for the Eastern District of California. Before that, she was Counsel at NARAL Pro-Choice America in Washington, D.C. Professor Co began her legal career as an Associate in the Insurance and Litigation practice groups at Wiley Rein LLP, also in Washington, DC.

Professor Co graduated cum laude from Georgetown University Law Center where she was the Editor In Chief of The Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law and received the National Association of Women Lawyers’ Outstanding Law Student Award for her contribution to the advancement of women in society. She graduated magna cum laude from the University of California, Berkeley, with a BA in Political Science.

Professor Co is a member of the California Bar and the District of Columbia Bar. In 2021, she began serving as a Pro Tem Judge for the Sacramento County Superior Court.

Tristin Green specializes in laws affecting inequality, especially employment discrimination law. She brings to her teaching and her scholarship a background in journalism and sociology and an interest in human relations and in the ways in which laws and contexts shape those relations. Her research and teaching interests include feminist legal theory, employment discrimination, race, gender and queer theory, status identity and emotions, torts, and administrative structures, including wealth transfer systems and civil procedure.

Diana Kasdan is Legal and Policy Director for the Center on Reproductive Health, Law, and Policy at UCLA Law. In this role, Diana will help lead the team’s legal and policy initiatives and engagement with academics, advocates, policymakers, and community members to reimagine the landscape of reproductive health law and policy.

Before joining CRHLP, Diana was Director of U.S. Judicial Strategy at the Center for Reproductive Rights. There, Diana conceived and led strategies to build stronger constitutional jurisprudence and legal rights for reproductive autonomy over the long-term, including development of original legal research, analysis and publications, amicus campaigns, and thematic convenings of scholars and legal advocacy partners.

For over a decade prior, Diana litigated, advocated, and researched in the areas of reproductive rights, prisoners’ rights, and voting rights at the ACLU and Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. Diana has written and published on reproductive rights, including most recently as a co-author on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization: Reckoning With its Impact and Charting a Path Forward, 25 U. Penn. J. Const. Law (2023) and the chapter, Human Rights and Abortion Access for People Living in Poverty: Implications for the United States and Globally, in Research Handbook on Human Rights and Poverty (Edward Elgar Publishing 2021).

Diana clerked for the Honorable Nicholas G. Garaufis of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York and received her J.D. from New York University School of Law where she was a member of the NYU Law Review, a Hays Civil Liberties Fellow, and a student legal advocate in the Immigrant Rights Clinic and the Civil Rights Clinic. She received her B.A. from Washington University.

Professor Margaret Russell has been a member of the Santa Clara University School of Law faculty since 1990, and is affiliated with the University’s Center for Social Justice & Public Service, the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, and the Center for Multicultural Learning. She has been honored for her contributions to student life at Santa Clara by the Asian Pacific Law Students Association and the Black Law Students Association. In 1991, she traveled to South Africa with a delegation of legal scholars to provide consultation on constitution-drafting for the post-apartheid transition.

Prior to joining the Santa Clara Law faculty, Professor Russell was a fellow at the public interest firm Public Advocates, Inc., a law firm in San Francisco. She served as the director of Public Interest Programs and as the acting assistant dean of student affairs at Stanford University, and also clerked for the Honorable James E. Doyle of the U.S. District Court in Madison, Wisconsin.