The Federal Rights Project Advisory Council

Erwin Chemerinsky, Chair: Professor Chemerinsky, noted constitutional law scholar and media commentator on legal issues, is the Alston & Bird Professor of Law at Duke Law School. He joined Duke in 2004 after several years at the University of Southern California Law School. He has received many honors for his teaching including awards from DePaul University (1983), USC Law School (1984 and 1991) and the Asian Pacific Law Students (1996) and the Black Law Students Association (1997). Professor Chemerinsky is the author of four books on constitutional matters and more than 100 law review articles that have appeared in journals such as the Harvard Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Northwestern Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Stanford Law Review and Yale Law Journal. He also is a frequent contributor to newspapers and magazines, and regularly serves as a commentator on legal issues for national and local media. Chemerinsky received his bachelor’s of science degree with highest distinction from Northwestern (1975) and J.D. cum laude from Harvard Law School (1978).

Richard H. Fallon, Jr.: Professor Fallon is a leading federal courts scholar and the Robert S. Tyler, Jr. Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School. He is the author of Implementing the Constitution, published in 2001 by Harvard University Press, and the co-author of Constitutional Law: Cases-Comments-Questions (9th ed. 2001) and the lead author of Hart & Wechsler's The Federal Courts and the Federal System (4th ed. 1996), which is the leading treatise on the subject. Professor Fallon joined the Harvard Law School faculty as an assistant professor of law in 1982 and was promoted to full professor in 1987. In 2000 he won the Law School's Sacks-Freund award for excellence in teaching. He is a graduate of Yale University (1975) and Yale University Law School (1980) and also earned a B.A. degree from Oxford University (1977), which he attended as a Rhodes Scholar. Before entering law teaching, Professor Fallon served as press secretary to then-U.S. Rep. William S. Cohen and as a law clerk to Judge J. Skelly Wright and to Justice Lewis F. Powell of the United States Supreme Court.

Timothy Jost: Timothy Jost, the Robert L. Willett Family Professor of Law, Washington and Lee University Law School, is a noted scholar in constitutional law and health law. He served as attorney and supervising attorney for legal aid programs in Chicago from 1975 to 1981, then began his teaching career at Ohio State University College of Law. He taught at the Colleges of Law and Medicine from 1987 to 1992. After serving as a Fulbright scholar at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, Wolfson College, Oxford University, 1988-89, Professor Jost was a Guest Professor and Fulbright Scholar at Universität, Göttingen, Germany, 1996-97. He then returned to Ohio State to become the Newton D. Baker, Baker & Hostetler Chair of Law and Professor of College of Medicine and Public Health, Division of Health Services Management and Policy from 1992 to 2001. In 2001 he joined the faculty of the Washington and Lee University. He received his bachelor of arts in 1970 from the University of California at Santa Cruz and his J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School, cum laude in 1975, and was inducted into the Order of the Coif.

Douglas Kendall: Mr. Kendall is the Community Rights Counsel’s founder and executive director. As CRC's executive director, he has represented local government clients in state and federal appellate courts around the country and before the U.S. Supreme Court. Mr. Kendall is also co-author of CRC's Takings Litigation Handbook: Defending Takings Challenges to Land Use Regulations (American Legal Publishing 2000). He received his undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Virginia.

Marianne Engelman Lado: Ms. Engelman Lado is General Counsel to New York Lawyers for the Public Interest (NYLPI), where she supervises and administers the litigation and advocacy program, which emphasize issues of disability rights, environmental justice, and access to health care. She has also helped to facilitate the development of the National Campaign to Restore Civil Rights, a nationwide effort to address the rollback of civil rights by the courts. Ms. Engelman Lado was previously a staff attorney at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), where she worked on litigation and advocacy within LDF’s Poverty & Justice Program. She also organized the legal effort in the late 1990s to save the public hospitals in New York City. She has taught graduate and undergraduate level courses in public administration, health policy, and education law at Baruch College. She holds a B.A. in government from Cornell University, a J.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, and an M.A. in Politics from Princeton University. Her many publications include “Unfinished Agenda: The Need for Civil Rights Litigation to Address Continuing Patterns of Race Discrimination and Inequalities in Access to Health Care,” “Breaking the Barriers of Access to Health Care: A Discussion of the Role of Civil Rights Litigation and the Relationship Between Burdens of Proof and the Experience of Denial,” and “A Question of Justice: African-American Legal Perspectives on the 1883 Civil Rights Cases.”

Alan B. Morrison: Alan B. Morrison founded the Public Citizen Litigation Group with Ralph Nader in Washington D.C. in 1972 and was its director for more than 25 years until he left the Group at the end of February 2004. He has an extensive practice before the United States Supreme Court, having argued 17 cases and having been co-counsel in another 100. At the Litigation Group he started a project that provides pro bono assistance to other lawyers who have cases before the Supreme Court, and he and his colleagues work on merits briefs and/or do moot courts in approximately 25 percent of the cases that the Court hears each term. Mr. Morrison was the President of the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers in 1999-2000. He has taught at various law schools on a part-time basis since 1978, and will become a Senior Lecturer at Stanford Law School beginning next fall.

Jane Perkins: Jane Perkins is Litigation Director of the National Health Law Program, a public interest law firm working to improve health care for low-income people, minorities, children, the elderly, and individuals with disabilities. Ms. Perkins directs NHeLP’s Court Watch Project and also focuses on Medicaid and discrimination in the delivery of health care. She is an expert on the developing restrictions on the use of Section 1983. Ms. Perkins has written numerous articles on Medicaid and has engaged in extensive litigation and policy advocacy.

Leslie Proll: Leslie M. Proll is the senior attorney in the Washington office of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. She has worked for the Legal Defense Fund since 1997. Her work has focused on judicial and executive nominations, economic justice policy and litigation, affirmative action and legislative civil rights issues. Prior to joining the Legal Defense Fund, Leslie was a civil rights lawyer in Birmingham, Alabama for ten years. She has litigated dozens of federal cases, including class actions and jury trials, in the areas of housing discrimination, employment discrimination, higher education school desegregation and voting rights. Ms. Proll founded the first non-profit fair housing organization in Alabama. She was the first female chair of the Labor and Employment Section of the Alabama State Bar. She chaired the Minority Participation Committee of the Birmingham Bar Association. Currently, she is co-chair of the Civil Rights Committee of the American Bar Association’s Section of Individual Rights and Responsibilities. For the past five years, she has co-chaired the Housing Task Force of the Leadership Conference of Civil Rights in Washington, DC. In 2003, she received the Congressional Black Caucus Chair’s Award. She is a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation. She began her career as a law clerk to Chief Judge Sam Pointer, Jr. of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Alabama. Leslie is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley and the University of California at Davis School of Law.