Join us for
NLG-LA’s Virtual
Disorientation Retreat
Saturday, October 16th from 9:30am PST to 4:30pm PST.
At the beginning of each academic year, NLG student chapters from SoCal based law schools organize a “DisOrientation” retreat to introduce the wider student body to the NLG and “people’s lawyering” in general. You can check out this year’s agenda HERE. Please also check out and share our digital resources such as the DisOrientation Manual, Deprogramming your 1L Brain, & Advice For Incoming Progressive Radical Students.
We will have an in-person mixer following the retreat from 5pm to 8pm PST at Verdugo Bar (3408 Verdugo Rd, Los Angeles, CA 90065) in Eagle Rock.
MEET THIS YEAR’S INCREDIBLE
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS & PANELISTS
Sean Garcia-Leys, Keynote Speaker
Sean Garcia-Leys is a civil rights attorney and public safety advocate who works to end law enforcement’s counterproductive gang suppression strategies.
He has successfully fought gang injunctions in LA, Orange, and Ventura counties; was instrumental in reducing the number of people in the CalGang database from 200,000 to 60,000 and ending LAPD’s participation in CalGang; and has testified as a gang expert in immigration court where he has successfully helped stop deportations. His research has been published in white papers by the UC Irvine Law School and the Urban Peace Institute that are widely cited in academic publications, and he is a frequent source for the news media regarding gang policing.
He is the recipient of the 2017 Chicano Hero award from Chicanxs Unidxs and the 2018 Equal Justice award from the ACLU of Southern California. Before becoming an attorney, Mr. Garcia-Leys worked as a high school teacher in Watts and East LA, and as a labor organizer. He currently serves as the Executive Director of the Peace & Justice Center.
Sabrina Rivera, Keynote Speaker
Sabrina is the Executive Director for the Orange County Justice Fund (OCJF) and an immigration attorney who has years of experience providing direct legal immigration services to indigent and immigrant communities vulnerable to deportation. The OCJF primarily aims to directly aid individuals with financial and legal assistance who cannot afford to pay bonds set by immigration judges and officials. Sabrina is formerly the supervising attorney at the Central American Resource Center (CARECEN) for the California State University Project that provides immigration legal services to eight CSU campuses in Southern California in affirmative and removal defense cases.
Before CARECEN, Sabrina served as the staff attorney at Western State College of Law’s (WSCL) Immigration Clinic in Irvine, California, where she directly represented clients in a range of matters, including deportation defense, humanitarian visas for survivors of violence, citizenship and asylum. She also supervised and mentored law students enrolled in the Immigration Clinic on cases and community-based education initiatives throughout Orange County, California. Sabrina currently serves as adjunct faculty at WSCL, and has been for the past six years, where she teaches a lawyering skills class. She is the former chair of the Orange County Bar Association’s Immigration Section. She received her JD from Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, and her BA in Chicana/o Studies and Political Science from California State University, Dominguez Hills.
Haley Pollock
Haley joined Inner City Law Center as a Housing Justice Fellow on the Tenant Defense Project in August, 2021. While in law school at Southwestern in Los Angeles, Haley was a board member on the homelessness prevention law project student association, which sparked her interest in pursing a legal career defending tenants from eviction. As a student, Haley worked in family law, immigration, & employment law. She holds a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Brandman University and a Juris Doctorate from Southwestern, where she focused on public interest law. In her free time, Haley enjoys walking around Los Angeles with her two terrier rescues, Vin Scully and Ruth Barker Ginsburg.
Jeffery Martin
Jeff is a 3L at Southwestern Law, where he serves as the Vice President of the Student Bar Association, the President of the Homelessness Prevention Law Project, the Co-Chair of the Public Interest Law Committee, and the Treasurer of Southwestern’s Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild. He is a Judge Harry Pregerson Public Interest Fellow and an active Legal Observer. He currently works as a clerk at the Alternate Public Defender’s office.
Maddie Seales
Maddie is a May 2020 graduate of the University of Miami School of Law. At Miami Law, Maddie co-founded the Alternative Legal Theories Reading Group and served as President of the Public Interest Leadership Board and Vice-President of the National Lawyers Guild. Prior to law school she was an actress in Los Angeles and an immigration case manager in New York. She is currently a deputy public defender with the Office of the Los Angeles County Public Defender.
Bob Solomon
Bob Solomon has been working on housing issues since 1972, when he began practicing law as a legal services attorney in Pennsylvania. In 1986, he started the country’s first law school homelessness clinic at Yale Law School. He is currently a Distinguished Clinical Professor of Law at UCI School of Law, where he co-directs the Community and Economic Development Committee.
Katherine Robinson
Katherine Robinson graduated from law school in 2018 and is an attorney in the Law Office of Carol Sobel. Katherine works with the Homeless Citation Legal Clinics, representing unhoused people ticketed with criminal infractions for sleeping on the street and other “quality of life” offenses.
Eric Post
Eric Post has been involved in the housing and homeless rights movement in Los Angeles since 2011, advocating for the rights of tenants, but also the rights of unhoused communities to access social services and public benefits, be free from criminalization and discrimination, and to remove barriers in accessing housing. Eric currently serves as a Senior Tenants’ Rights Attorney and the Director of the Appeals Unit for the Los Angeles-based nonprofit BASTA, Inc. where he represents tenants in appeals, in complicated eviction cases, and in affirmative cases holding landlords accountable for slum housing, discrimination, illegal overcharging, and harassment. A life-long leftist and guild member, and a proud graduate of Howard University School of Law, Eric is an avid student of strategies and tactics to achieve an enforceable right to housing and to eradicate landlords as a class, as well as strategies and tactics to obtain immediate concrete results for families facing housing insecurity and homelessness.
Walter Riley
Walter Riley is an Oakland lawyer and a veteran of the Civil Rights movement. His areas of practice include criminal defense, civil rights, and police misconduct. He grew up in the Jim Crow South and became an activist at a young age and continues activism to the present. He served extensively with Durham’s NAACP, organizing voter registration campaigns, lunch counter sit-ins, job campaigns, and protests. He chaired the Young Adult NAACP Chapter of Durham, later Durham chapter of CORE, the Freedom Highways Project to desegregate public facilities on Highway 1 from Maine to Florida and was a CORE’s South East Regional Organizer in the early 60s. He was the lead attorney for the BlackFriday14, and other #BlackLivesMatter protesters. He has received numerous awards including California Black Lawyers Association Presidents Award, National Lawyers Guild San Francisco Chapter, Champion Of Justice, National Lawyers Guild National, Law for the People Award, and the East Bay Sanctuary Covenant Award. He has been honored in the U.S. Congressional Record By Hon. Barbara Lee and in the California State Assembly by Hon. Jackie Goldberg.
Morgan Ricketts
Morgan Ricketts is the co-president of the National Lawyers Guild Los Angeles chapter. She is a solo practitioner who focuses almost exclusively on civil rights cases against police. She has litigated First Amendment issues for protesters, excessive force incidents, the denial of medical care to prisoners, and institutional liability of police departments. She is one of several attorneys for the class action against the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department regarding its indiscriminate use of weapons against peaceful protesters. She hosts the Guild’s monthly Police Misconduct Roundtables by Zoom, in which police misconduct litigators from around the country share ideas and learn from one another. She is also a longtime member of the Guild’s National Police Accountability Project. She is available to mentor law students and young attorneys interested in civil rights work.
Olu Orange
Olu K. Orange is the Director of the USC Dornsife Trial Advocacy Program. Orange also founded and serves as the Director of the USC Dornsife Agents of Change: Civil Rights Advocacy Initiative (“AoC”). Created in 2020, AoC is the first undergraduate civil rights clinic in the nation. Mr. Orange was one of 17 lawyers (of the 266,000 in California) selected by the Daily Journal, to be honored with the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of California as a Top Lawyer of the Decade. Mr. Orange was recognized for his decade-defining civil rights work. Orange has thrice been selected as a recipient of the California Lawyer Attorney of the Year (CLAY) Award — first in 2015, again in 2017, and yet again in 2021 for his civil rights work. In 2016, Orange was selected as one of the Daily Journal’s Top 100 lawyers in California in recognition of his civil rights and entertainment law practices at his firm, Orange Law Offices, P.C. Orange began practicing law in California as a Deputy Public Defender in Orange County.
Catherine Sweetser
Catherine Sweetser is Deputy Director of the Promise Institute for Human Rights, and Director of the Human Rights Litigation Clinic at UCLA School of Law. Her primary research and teaching interests are international human rights law, global administrative law, and corporate and government accountability for international law & constitutional violations. She was previously a Partner and is currently of counsel at Schonbrun, Seplow, Harris, Hoffman & Zeldes LLP where she litigates cases concerning human rights and civil rights. In particular, she has litigated cases under the Alien Tort Statute and the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, and other matters concerning corporate accountability, police misconduct, conditions of detention, and international and constitutional law violations. Prior to joining SSHH LLP, she practiced at Altshuler Berzon LLP in San Francisco.
Andrew Hairston
Andrew Reginald Hairston is a civil rights attorney and writer based in Austin. He presently directs the Education Justice Project at Texas Appleseed — a public interest justice center celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. In this role, he works to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline and secure equal educational opportunities for Black & Brown children, LGBTQ young people, and kids with disabilities across Texas. He began his legal career as the 2016-2017 George N. Lindsay Fellow at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and he previously served as a staff attorney at Advancement Project’s National Office. He is licensed to practice law in Louisiana.
Titilayo Rasaki
Titilayọ Rasaki (She/Her) is a lover of God who shape-shifts to radiate that love in ways that serve the needs of each moment. Whether harnessing her skills as a lawyer, community organizer, or yoga practitioner (RYT 200), she is seeking to unleash the power of love as a healing force for social justice. Titilayọ believes revolution begins in the heart and her work focuses on healing the trauma social injustices have on our nervous system, while decolonizing oppressive mental programming and somatic patterns. She is a commitment to loving, relational, and transformative organizing that unleashes resources to allow more people to access healing modalities to heal intergenerational trauma, affirm their dignity, and connect deeply to community resources.
Jessica Alcantara
Jessica Alcantara is a Staff Attorney at the Advancement Project National Office where she works on the Opportunity to Learn program supporting Black and Latinx communities fighting for the safe, quality, community schools that they deserve. She joined Advancement Project in 2016 as a Skadden Fellow. She attended Columbia Law School and was active with BLSA, LALSA, the Student Public Interest Network, the Admissions Office, and the Columbia Journal of Race and Law. Jessica also holds a Master’s Degree in Latin American and Latino Studies from Fordham University; served as a Youth Development Volunteer in Azerbaijan as part of the Peace Corps; and is an alumna of the Prep for Prep program in New York City.
Victor Narro
Victor Narro is a former co-president for the National Lawyers Guild Los Angeles Chapter. He has been an NLG-LA Board member since 1996. Victor currently serves as the Project Director and Professor of Labor Studies for UCLA Labor Center. He is also core faculty for the Public Interest Law Program of UCLA Law School.
Helen You
Helen You has spent her whole career as an attorney practicing at a small plaintiff-side employment firm, Hennig Kramer Ruiz & Singh LLP. Helen represents employees in disputes involving discrimination and harassment based on race, sex, gender identity, age, and disability, failure to accommodate, whistleblower retaliation, misclassification, and wage and hour violations, and also works on federal qui tam fraud cases. Presently, Helen has been a member of the NLG since she was a 1L and presently serves as the Coordinator of the NLG-LA Workers Rights Committee.
Yvonne Medrano
Yvonne Garcia Medrano is an attorney with Bet Tzedek Legal Services’ Employment Rights Project, where she represents low wage workers in their wage theft claims and assists worker centers’ by providing legal guidance to their members. Previously, Yvonne worked at the CA Department of Industrial Relations as counsel to the Director. Prior to that she worked as a Legal Organizer with the CLEAN Carwash Campaign. Yvonne graduated from Loyola Marymount University in 2007 and from Southwestern Law School in 2012.
Donna Harati
Donna was born and raised on Karankawa territory in Houston, Texas to Iranian immigrant parents and has lived in present-day Washington, D.C., Santa Fe, Boston, Cincinnati, and Cleveland before moving to Los Angeles, Tongva territory, five years ago. Donna has been actively involved in prison abolition related work for over a decade and taught full time at the Penitentiary of New Mexico for two years while simultaneously serving as a crisis volunteer at the Santa Fe Rape Crisis Center. Donna’s day job is as the Director of Legal Services/Tattoo Removal and Community Lawyer at Homeboy Industries. Donna is committed to transformative justice based responses to harm and to imagining and working toward a world free of the carceral state where everyone can thrive. Donna dabbles in herbalism, collage, coaching, hiking, gardening and doula work and loves reading, book clubs, swimming in the ocean, and sloths.
Julieta Flores
Julieta Flores graduated from Loyola Law School in 2017. She is licensed to practice law in California. Julieta has been a public defender for four years. She began her career as a public defender with the Ventura County Public Defender’s Office. She practiced in Ventura County for one year. In November 2018, she joined the Los Angeles County Public Defender’s Office.
Deloris “Dela” Wilson
Deloris “Dela” Wilson as the 2021-2022 social entrepreneur-in-residence (SEIR) at the USC Marshall School of Business. She is the founder and managing director of Axle Impact Studio, a global social impact strategy firm, and the founder of Due Goodies, a promotional products company targeting the student loan debt crisis. Previously, she served as head of impact and strategy for HBCUvc, a leading non-profit reimagining the innovation economy by developing the next generation of venture capital leaders, and head of strategy and operations for BEACON: The D.C. Women Founders Initiative, a public-private partnership and campaign among Google, the D.C. Mayor’s Office and Georgetown’s Institute for Technology Law and Policy. As the editor of Black Founders at at Work: Journeys to Innovation, she helped chart the leadership and business journeys of some of the world’s most successful technology entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. Dela is a sought-after speaker and writer and has received recognition from the Atlantic Institute, the World Economic Forum, Georgetown Law Tech Institute, Humanity in Action, the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard University, and the University of California at Berkeley. She earned a J.D. from Georgetown University, an MPA from Harvard University, and a B.A. in political science from Spelman College.
Tiffany Yang
Tiffany is a clinical teaching fellow and supervising attorney at Georgetown Law. Before joining Georgetown, she practiced movement lawyering with the Advancement Project’s national office and conducted civil rights impact and appellate litigation as a Skadden Fellow with the Washington Lawyers’ Committee.