Deborah N. Archer
Professor of Law
Director, Racial Justice Project

Specialties: Anti-Discrimination Law and Economic Justice, Civil Rights

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An expert in the areas of civil rights, racial discrimination, Deborah N. Archer directs New York Law School’s Racial Justice Project and the Civil Rights Clinic. Professor Archer was previously an assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., where she litigated at the trial and appellate levels in cases involving affirmative action in higher education, employment discrimination, school desegregation, and voting rights. She was also a Marvin H. Karpatkin Fellow with the American Civil Liberties Union, where she was involved in federal and state litigation on issues of race and poverty. Prior to joining New York Law School, Professor Archer was an associate at Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett LLP.

As the Director of the Racial Justice Project and the Civil Rights Clinic, Professor Archer continues to work to protect the constitutional and civil rights of people of color and increase public awareness of racism, racial injustice, and structural racial inequality. Professor Archer has also participated as amicus counsel in several cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and U.S. Courts of Appeal, including Ricci v. DeStefano, Fisher v. University of Texas, and Hithon v. Tyson Foods.

Professor Archer graduated with honors from Smith College in 1993 and was awarded her J.D. from Yale Law School in 1996. Thereafter, she clerked for Judge Alvin Thompson in the United States District Court for the District of Connecticut. Professor Archer is a member of the National Board of Directors of the American Civil Liberties Union and the Board of Directors of the New York Civil Liberties Union. She was selected as an Aspen Ideas Festival Scholar and has also served on the Association of the Bar of the City of New York’s Civil Rights Committee, and on the Committee on Civil Rights of the New York State Bar Association.

Tamara C. Belinfanti
Associate Professor of Law

Specialties: Corporate Law, Law and Culture

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Tamara C. Belinfanti joined the Law School in the fall 2009 semester and will teach Contracts, Corporations, and a transactional skills course entitled “Closing the Deal.” Her teaching and scholarly interests are primarily in the fields of corporate law and law and culture. Previously, Professor Belinfanti was a corporate attorney at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP. While at the law firm, she counseled domestic and international clients on U.S. securities and general corporate law matters; was co-editor of a securities law treatise, U.S. Regulation of the International Securities and Derivatives Market (Aspen, 2003); and participated in a law teaching pilot program in New York City public high schools. Professor Belinfanti’s recent article on the proxy advisory industry is forthcoming in the Stanford Journal of Law, Business & Finance. She is a legal aid volunteer and a member of the New York bar.

Elise C. Boddie
Associate Professor of Law
Associate Director, Racial Justice Project

Specialties: Anti-Discrimination Law and Economic Justice, Civil Rights

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Professor Boddie practiced civil rights litigation before she entered academia. She was an associate director of litigation at the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc. and directed its Education Program. She litigated at the trial and appellate levels in the areas of affirmative action, employment, school desegregation, and economic justice. Professor Boddie was also the first recipient of the Fried Frank/NAACP-LDF fellowship. Professor Boddie serves as the Racial Justice Project's Associate Director.

Alesha Brown
Member, Justice Action Center
Co-Chair, Street Law Project
 

Alesha Brown is a proud native of Charleston, South Carolina. As a second year law student, she co-chairs New York Law School’s Street Law Project. She is also playing an intricate role in the launching of a related mentoring program, which will include New York Law School students and 6th graders at Middle School 22. Alesha is also a student in the Urban Law Clinic, where she represents children with special needs and individuals who are discriminated against in the workplace.

Kirk D. Burkhalter
Associate Professor of Law

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Kirk D. Burkhalter ’04 joined the faculty in the fall 2010 semester and will teach Legal Practice. Previously, he was the Visiting Assistant Professor of Academic Support at Hofstra School of Law, where he taught Legal Methods. In addition, Professor Burkhalter helped Hofstra students adjust to the academic demands of law school and develop the skills to enable them to realize their full academic potential through workshops, seminars, and individual counseling. He also conducted workshops and seminars that focused on the analytical and organizational skills specific to preparation for the New York State Bar Examination. Professor Burkhalter was formerly the Associate Director of Academic Affairs and an adjunct professor at New York Law School, where he provided academic counseling and taught The Principles of Legal Analysis. He has also taught at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Before working in academia, he was an associate in the Corporate Securities and Finance practice group at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP. Professor Burkhalter also served 20 years in the New York City Police Department (NYPD), retiring as a detective first grade. He spent the majority of his career with the NYPD conducting long-term investigations into organized criminal enterprises and domestic, ecological, and industrial terrorism.

David Chang
Professor of Law

Specialty: Constitutional Law

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At first glance, David Chang’s reserved exterior belies the deep feelings he has for righting society’s wrongs, especially with regard to racial discrimination. But his passion and commitment to addressing these issues quickly become clear not only through his conversation and writings, but also through his actions. Former cochair of the New York City Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project, Professor Chang worked hard to combat some of the City’s most heinous incidents of brutality and to push for legislative remedies through the passage of anti-hate crimes statutes. He has written extensively on hate crimes legislation and the constitutionality of affirmative action policies. He has also worked with the Los Angeles-based Center for Law in the Public Interest. He is now chairman of the Board of Directors of Pratt Area Community Council, an organization that serves a wide range of housing-related needs for low- and moderate-income residents of Brooklyn.

Mercer Givhan
Associate Professor of Law
Faculty Advisor, Street Law Project

Mercer Givhan, or "Monte" as he is commonly known, is an associate professor with the Legal Practice Program. Professor Givhan has spent virtually his entire adult life working with and on behalf of low income communities of color and has extensive experience in the fields of indigent defense, criminal justice, and community development. After graduating from Yale Law School in 1994, Professor Givhan clerked for the Honorable Nathaniel R. Jones on the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, then joined the staff of the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia where he worked for nearly five years in the trial division. Professor Givhan has also served as a program officer with the Soros Foundation/Open Society Institute’s Criminal Justice Initiative, managing a grant-making portfolio that included supporting efforts to abolish the death penalty, hold prosecutors accountable for misconduct, combat racial profiling by law enforcement, and raise the quality of legal services available to indigent criminal defendants nationwide.

Currently, he is a member of the faculty of the Southern Public Defender Training Center. In addition to his work in the arena of criminal justice, Professor Givhan spent several years working in various capacities with Groundwork, Inc., a Brooklyn-based nonprofit organization that partners with community members to improve outcomes for children and families living in or near to public housing in East New York and Bedford Stuyvesant. Prior to joining the faculty at New York Law School, Professor Givhan spent two years as a clinical teaching fellow with Fordham Law School’s Community Economic Development (CED) clinic and one year as a clinical instructor with the CED clinic at CUNY Law School. He is a native of Philadelphia, PA, a graduate of Morehouse College, and the father of a teenage son.

Matthew Hellman
Member, Justice Action Center
Fellow, Racial Justice Project 

Matthew Hellman is a third-year law student who is motivated by public service and social justice. Believing that the law can be an equalizing force, he is interested in public service initiatives, social justice, criminal justice, and civil/human rights. Matthew is a member of the Justice Action Center, and affiliated with the NYLS chapter of Lawyers Without Borders. This year, he will be a member of the Civil Rights Clinic. Last year, Matthew was a member of ‘Project Detention in the War against Terrorism’ under Professor Ellman, an initiative concerned with the detention of individuals in the War in Afghanistan. In the past, he has worked at the New York State Division of Human Rights in the Bronx and at the Essex County Prosecutor's Office, Juvenile Division, in Newark, NJ. After graduation, Matthew, plans to work for the public interest in the criminal justice system.

Chaumtoli Huq
Associate Professor of Law
 

Chaumtoli Huq joined New York Law School in the Fall of 2011 to teach Legal Practice. She recently served as the Director of Litigation at Manhattan Legal Services, an affiliate of Legal Services NYC, and through its offices in Harlem and Lower Manhattan provided free legal services to low-income New Yorkers on a wide range of legal issues, including housing, consumer rights, and employment.

For more than 10 years Professor Huq has devoted her career to the public interest, serving in positions such as the director of the first South Asian Workers Rights Project (SAWRP) in the country at the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF), and as the first Staff Attorney to the New York Taxi Workers Alliance (NYTWA), a multi-ethnic immigrant worker–led labor organization of taxi-drivers. Professor Huq serves on the Council of Advisors for South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT), a national non-profit organization that elevates the perspectives on South Asian individuals and community based organizations through public policy analysis and advocacy.

Felicia A. Reid
Member, Justice Action Center
Fellow, Racial Justice Project
Research Assistant to Professor Deborah Archer 

Felicia, a third-year law student, is a member of and former Carbonell Fellow for the Justice Action Center, an associate of the International Law Society, and formerly the Latin America Regional Editor for the Global Human Rights Bulletin. She has worked in New York County’s Matrimonial courts, for the Children’s Aid Society, and collaborated with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Racial Justice Program on a review of the nexus between systemic racism and food deserts. She was a former member of the Urban (Civil Rights) Law Clinic, where she represented low-income clients in age discrimination and special education cases. In 2011, the Justice Action Center awarded her the ‘Social Consciousness Award’ for her outstanding contributions to the area of social justice. After graduation, Felicia intends to work in the area of juvenile justice community development; to this end, she founded the ‘Green Guyana Project’, an initiative that seeks to turn recyclable waste into funding for community development initiatives in Guyana, South America.

Katie Smelas
Member, Justice Action Center
Youth Coordinator, Street Law Project

Concentration: International Human Rights

Katie Smelas is a second-year law student and serves as the Youth Coordinator for the Justice Action Center’s Street Law Project. She is responsible for creating the curriculum for middle school students, which introduces the students to the law and focuses on students’ rights in schools. Katie is also the Vice President of the New York Law School Student Division of Lawyers Without Borders and is a teaching assistant for Professor Tamara Belinfanti’s Contracts class. Katie is continuing her summer internship with the New York City Conflicts of Interest Board, a government agency that interprets and enforces Chapter 68, the conflicts of interest law.

Parisa Tafti
Associate Professor of Law
 

Prior to joining the Legal Practice faculty at New York Law School, Professor Parisa Tafti was a staff attorney in the Special Litigation and Parole divisions at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia. While at PDS, in addition to representing clients charged with serious crimes and technical violations of supervision in administrative hearings, she litigated issues of constitutional and systemic magnitude—including false and coerced confessions, competency to stand trial and understand Miranda warnings, the right to confront witnesses, and the right to post-conviction DNA testing. As an attorney with the Special Litigation Division, she won the first post-conviction DNA exoneration in D.C. when a D.C. Superior Court vacated Donald Gates’s conviction for the rape and murder of a young college student and released him from prison after serving twenty-eight years of what was essentially a life sentence. Prior to her tenure at PDS, as a Chesterfield Smith Fellow at Holland & Knight, Professor Tafti represented clients on a pro bono basis. In one such representation, her team won the release of Wilbert Rideau after he had spent over forty years in Louisiana prisons due to racial animus that existed when Mr. Rideau was first tried in 1961. Professor Taft’s scholarly interests include the effects of parole on the over-incarceration of racial minorities, and the effects of the FBI’s CODIS regulations on post-conviction DNA testing. She is a graduate of New York University School of Law, and received her BA in Philosophy and Comparative Literature from the University of California at Berkeley.

Erika L. Wood
Associate Professor of Law
 

Erika L. Wood teaches Legal Practice at New York Law School. Prior to joining the faculty, Professor Wood was the Deputy Director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, taught the Public Policy Advocacy Clinic at New York University School of Law, and was an attorney with the Legal Action Center. She has designed and launched major reform campaigns around the country, litigated complex civil rights cases, and authored several groundbreaking reports and numerous articles. Professor Wood provides legal counsel and strategic guidance to advocates, legislators and policymakers nationwide, and is a frequent speaker and commentator on voting rights, criminal justice reform, and racial justice issues. In 2009, Rutgers School of Law awarded her the Eric. R. Neisser Public Interest Award in recognition of her efforts to carry forward the Law School’s mission of providing liberty and justice for all. Professor Wood earned her BA cum laude from New York University, and graduated with honors from Rutgers School of Law where she earned the Kinoy-Stavis Fellowship and the Myron Harkavey prize.