TIMOTHY CASEY
Director of Curricular Administration and Professor from Practice

Tim Casey will teach Professional Responsibility and provide support for the non-senate law faculty. He started his teaching career at Columbia Law School, where he established a Criminal Practice Clinic and received the Presidential Award for teaching. He also held an appointment as a professor of law at Case Western Reserve University. And he received a Fulbright award for research and teaching in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Most recently, Casey served as the director of the STEPPS Program and professor in residence at California Western School of Law, where he oversaw an innovative program in legal ethics and lawyering skills. He also was a visiting professor at the University of San Diego School of Law. Before entering legal academia, he practiced law as a public defender in New York City.

Casey is an internationally recognized expert in experiential legal education. His research interests include legal ethics, surveillance and civil liberties, problem-solving courts and experiential pedagogy. He is a co-author of Legal Ethics in the Practice of Law (Carolina Academic Press, Fifth Edition, 2019), and his scholarship has appeared in law reviews including UC Davis Law Review and SMU Law Review. He serves as chair of the Legal Ethics Committee of the San Diego County Bar Association, a board member for local and international non-profit organizations, and a member of the editorial board for the peer-reviewed Clinical Law Review.

He received his B.A. from Boston College, J.D. from UC Law San Francisco and LL.M. from Columbia Law School.

HANNAH GARRY
Executive Director of the Promise Institute and Professor from Practice

Hannah Garry joins UCLA Law as executive director of the Promise Institute for Human Rights and professor from practice. Garry has devoted her legal career to seeking justice and accountability for human rights abuses and atrocity situations across the globe, while making the U.S. a destination for the study and practice of human rights law.

She joins UCLA Law from USC Gould School of Law, where she was clinical professor of law and founding director of the International Human Rights Clinic for 12 years. Her areas of teaching and scholarship include international criminal law, transitional justice, international human rights law and international refugee law. She has supervised student attorneys in the clinic on cases and projects nationally and internationally that address atrocity crimes, refugee rights, fair trial rights, gender justice, human trafficking and systemic racism.

Garry’s career as an international human rights advocate, scholar and teacher took root when she was a graduate student at Oxford University’s Refugee Studies Centre. After graduation, she was hired by Oxford as a field researcher visiting refugee camps throughout Uganda and Kenya for two years where she witnessed and documented first-hand the abuses refugees endure in exile while under the protection of the international community.

Garry has held many other academic and expert legal advisor positions, including in international criminal courts and leading human rights organizations, and she has been quoted widely in major media outlets. Last year, she was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Oslo Law’s PluriCourts Centre in Norway.

Garry earned her J.D. from UC Berkeley and master’s in international affairs from Columbia University.

MELISSA GOODMAN
Executive Director of the Center on Reproductive Health, Law, and Policy

Melissa Goodman joins UCLA Law as the inaugural executive director of the Center on Reproductive Health, Law, and Policy after a five-year tenure as the legal and advocacy director for the ACLU of Southern California. There, Goodman led 60 attorneys across Southern California and oversaw the department’s visioning and strategy, strategic planning, intersectional issue and cross-team collaboration and resource allocation. In doing so, she helped lead statewide legislative, electoral and organizing strategy. She also co- chaired the national ACLU’s Gender Justice Task Force.

Goodman previously spent a decade as the ACLU SoCal’s Audrey Irmas Director of the LGBTQ Gender and Reproductive Justice Project, and as a senior litigation and policy counsel for reproductive and LGBTQ rights at the New York Civil Liberties Union. In those roles, she led and participated in reproductive justice, LGBTQ and gender equity litigation, as well as policy advocacy campaigns. Along the way, Goodman led or co-counseled an array of high-profile cases, including those involving pregnant unaccompanied immigrant minors; gay, bisexual and transgender prisoners; and same-gender couples.

Goodman clerked for Judge Frederic Block of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York. She earned her B.A., magna cum laude, from New York University and her J.D. from NYU School of Law.

EMILY CHURG
Lecturer in Law

Emily Churg teaches Legal Research and Writing. She previously practiced complex commercial litigation at WilmerHale and ran her own bar exam preparation company. She has also taught legal writing at USC Gould School of Law and undergraduate writing at Arizona State University.

She earned her B.A., with honors, from UC Santa Cruz; her Ph.D. in rhetoric, composition and linguistics from Arizona State; and her J.D., Order of the Coif, from UC Davis School of Law. After law school, she clerked for Judge S. James Otero of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.

THOMAS WANEBO
Lecturer in Law

Thomas Wanebo teaches Legal Analysis, Writing, and Research for LL.M. students. He currently works as a trial attorney at Neighborhood Legal Services of Los Angeles County, defending low-income families against eviction. He began his career as a litigation associate at Irell & Manella in Los Angeles.

Wanebo earned his B.A. from Colorado State University and his J.D. from UCLA Law, where he was a senior editor of the UCLA Law Review. His publications include the article “Remote Killing and the Fourth Amendment: Updating Constitutional Law to Address Expanded Police Lethality in the Robotic Age,” which appeared in the UCLA Law Review.

MELODI DINCER
UCLA Institute for Technology, Law and Policy Fellow

Melodi Dincer will join UCLA Law in January 2024 as a fellow with the UCLA Institute for Technology, Law and Policy. Her work focuses on helping social movements fight algorithmic violence and build transformative futures.

She was previously an appellate advocacy fellow with the Electronic Privacy Information Center and has been a legal research fellow and clinical supervising attorney at NYU School of Law, where she earned her J.D. She earned her B.A. from Brown University.

RUTHIE LAZENBY
Shapiro Fellow in Environmental Law and Policy

As the Shapiro Fellow in Environmental Law and Policy for 2023–25, Ruthie Lazenby will be focusing on energy law and regulation. She was previously a staff attorney in the Environmental Justice Clinic at Vermont Law School and a legal fellow in the environmental justice program at New York Lawyers for the Public Interest.

She earned her B.A. from Wesleyan University and her J.D. from Yale Law School, where she was an editor of the Law and Political Economy Blog.

Read more in UCLA Law Magazine Fall 2023

Anna Norkett Kao ’24 was inspired to go to law school because her brother had been incarcerated. When she met Dolovich and learned about the Prison Law and Policy Program, it all clicked.

“I have learned from the greatest professors in this field and developed relationships with classmates who are dedicating their lives to helping those most vulnerable. Daily, I’m surrounded by people who inspire me, challenge me, lament with me, hold me accountable and encourage me to keep going. The opportunities I’ve had to jump into this work even as a student are incredible and will forever shape me as an advocate,” she says.

Norkett Kao has been involved in several initiatives under the umbrella of the program, including the Behind Bars Data Project, the Prisoners’ Rights Clinic and the Incarcerated Persons Pen Pal Project, which she led last year through the Law Students for Decarceration group.

After graduation, she hopes to gain experience in litigation and eventually become a professor of prison law and policy at a law school in Texas.

“I’d like to equip and inspire the next generation of advocates for the incarcerated, as I have been equipped and inspired at UCLA. I’ve watched as a few key professors have shaped dozens— even hundreds—of students over the years into passionate, skilled advocates for the incarcerated, and I would love to bring similar opportunities to students in a different part of the country,” she says.

In 2023, UCLA Law’s Prison Accountability Project, led by a team of student researchers, published a report that details incarcerated individuals’ experiences in California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) facilities during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Supported by their faculty advisor, Dolovich, the report’s co-authors—third-year students Nora Browning, Joseph Gaylin, Shireen Jalali-Yazdi and Kamilah Mims—and a team of student volunteers transcribed and coded hundreds of calls and letters from people incarcerated in 28 CDCR facilities between April 2020 and April 2021, utilizing data provided by UCI’s PrisonPandemic project.

They identified routine medical abuse and neglect, unsanitary conditions, extreme isolation and physical violence directed at incarcerated individuals, often unreported by official oversight bodies.

“In the absence of rigorous external oversight that centers the experiences of incarcerated people, my hope is that [this project] can provide advocates, lawyers and organizers with accurate information about widespread problems in California carceral institutions,” says Gaylin ’24, co-author of the report and founder of the Prison Accountability Project. Gaylin came to UCLA Law specifically for its Prison Law and Policy Program.

“Everyone is impacted by mass incarceration, whether they realize it or not,” says Brisely Martinez ’24.

Martinez is passionate about seeing more formerly incarcerated and systems-impacted people in the legal profession. She is a co-founder and co- president of the Alliance for Formerly Incarcerated and System Impacted Students (AFISIS), a new student-led group at UCLA Law focused on increasing the prison to university pipeline. Alicia Virani, the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation Director of UCLA Law’s Criminal Justice Program, is the group’s faculty advisor.

Martinez is ‘systems impacted’ herself – that is, she has loved ones who have been impacted by the criminal legal system, mass incarceration and the hyper-criminalization of communities of color.

“For folks who have experienced anything in the criminal legal system, know that we are here; we exist, and we deserve to have access to the privilege of higher education,” she says.

AFISIS aims to help systems-impacted individuals from both the outside and the inside. Their goals include increasing the visibility of systems- impacted law students; creating pathways for formerly incarcerated and systems-impacted students to attend law school; and addressing the ways law schools and the legal profession themselves hinder those pathways.

Martinez is specializing in critical race studies and is a mentor in UCLA Law’s Law Fellows program, of which she is an alumna.

“My community is not just my ethnicity – it’s also people who have experienced the injustices that I have experienced. You don’t often think of diversity this way, but — to me — it is an identity, and to a lot of us it is,” she says. “When law schools talk about diversity, our voices and our community should be included in those conversations.”

Read more in UCLA Law Magazine Fall 2023