ALUMNI VANESSA LAVELY ’08 AND SAMUEL FISCHER ’82 NAMED

INTRODUCING NEW BOARD LEADERSHIP: LAVELY AND FISCHER

Two members of the UCLA School of Law’s Board of Advisors, the group of distinguished law school alumni who provide strategic input on faculty and student recruitment, alumni outreach, long-

term priorities, and other topics of interest to the school—have been elevated to the role of co-chair.

Vanessa Lavely ’08 and Samuel Fischer ’82 assumed their new leadership positions on the board beginning with the group’s April meeting. They succeeded Alicia Miñana de Lovelace ’87, who joined the board in 2012 and has served as board chair since 2020 and who is now taking on the role of chair of the Board of Directors of the UCLA Foundation.

The appointments were announced by Jennifer L. Mnookin, the School of Law’s former dean.

“Alicia Miñana de Lovelace has been an extraordinary leader of our Board of Advisors,” said Mnookin. “Through her thoughtful and strategic approach to a range of opportunities and challenges faced by the school, she has been a valued partner. Talented and tireless, she departs with my gratitude and heartfelt thanks for her enormous contributions to UCLA Law.

“Vanessa and Sam have a pair of big shoes to fill, but I know that they will do just that,” added Mnookin.

As chair, Miñana de Lovelace set a model for a high level of board engagement and activity, introduced a set of working groups to partner with law school staff on important areas of the school’s operations and mission and helped expand board membership to be more diverse across geography and practice area.

Miñana de Lovelace has practiced law in Los Angeles for more than three decades and today focuses primarily on nonprofit board work. Her contributions to UCLA Law and the university have been immense. In addition to her work on the school’s Board of Advisors, she has served on the centennial campaign committees of both the law school and the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies. She is a past president of La Raza Law Alumni Association, and she and her husband, Rob Lovelace, the vice chairman and president of Capital Group Companies, gave the founding gift for the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at the law school and have made significant gifts to the school’s Critical Race Studies Program. Her philanthropic activities also extend to the wider Los Angeles community. She is the founding chair of the board of directors of the Learning Rights Law Center, a nonprofit formed by UCLA Law alumni to assist low-income families and advocate for their children, and serves as a volunteer attorney for the center. She is also on the board of Human Rights Watch and was recently named chair of the board of the Nature Conservancy Caribbean program. She also serves as cochair of the Pacific Council’s development committee. Lavely, the first board leader to be based outside Los Angeles, is a litigation partner at Cravath, Swaine & Moore in the firm’s New York office, where she handles antitrust, intellectual property, environmental, commercial and securities litigation for corporate clients. One of Crain’s New York Business’s “Notable Women in Law” in 2022, Lavely has also been named a Future Star by Benchmark Litigation (2019–2022) and was featured on its “40 and Under Hot List” (2019–2021).

“I am honored to take the baton from Alicia, who has given so much to UCLA Law,” says Lavely. “I look forward to collaborating with the school’s leadership, my co-chair, Sam, and our fellow board members to continue the great work of those who have come before us. Our board is highly engaged, and we are fortunate to have a deep bench of diverse talents and backgrounds. For my part, I aim to expand our presence here in New York, while still visiting campus as often as possible—especially during winter!”

Sam Fischer is a partner at the Century City–based entertainment law firm Ziffren Brittenham, where he represents leading actors, writers, directors, producers, executives and companies in motion pictures, television and new media. The Hollywood Reporter named Fischer one the “100 Power Lawyers in the Entertainment Industry” and designated him a Legal Legend in 2022.

“I am terrifically excited to work with UCLA Law’s leadership and Vanessa Lavely,” says Fischer, “and to work with all our board members to build on the wonderful legacy established by Alicia Miñana de Lovelace.”

Samuel Fischer ’82 Vanessa Lavely ’08

INTRODUCING CRT FORWARD

Critical Race Studies launches innovative new project that identifies, tracks, and analyzes measures that restrict truth-telling in education

Pausing diversity training, withdrawing educational resources, ignoring pleas from community members, students and parents to advance antiracist teaching and curriculum—these are specific instances of real-world local, state and national restrictions on access to truthful information about structural racism through a disinformation campaign to reject Critical Race Theory (CRT).

Critical Race Studies (CRS), the first law-based CRT program in the country, recently launched CRT Forward to address the recent assault on CRT while also highlighting the past, present and future contributions of the theory. Using the expertise of the unique CRS program and the capacity of UCLA Law, the project works extensively to advance a better understanding of the patterns and trends that characterize the assaults on CRT, as well as their overwhelming perverseness.

A foundational $400,000 grant from the Lumina Foundation’s Racial and Equity Fund provided the resources to add CRT Forward Project Director Taifha Natalee Alexander ’21 as leader of the project. An alumna of Georgetown Law, Alexander has more than ten years of experience in institutionalizing diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. She earned her LL.M., with a specialization in CRS, from UCLA Law. “The project was created to help people understand the breadth of the attacks aimed at restricting the ability to speak truthfully about race, racism, and systemic racism,” says Alexander. “It is also my hope that students will continue to have access to CRT and understand the ways it can address some of the most pressing racial and social issues of our time.”

A critical component of CRT Forward is the Tracking Project, an interactive database designed to allow users to gain a deeper understanding of the magnitude of the attacks on antiracism efforts in K–12 education, higher education, government agencies and private businesses. The Tracking Project database can be accessed through the CRT Forward website, where visitors can gather information about anti-CRT activity at the local, state and federal levels.

Tracking Project researchers have screened more than 26,000 media articles and identified over 500 instances of anti-CRT activity. The project database consists of multiple unique features that allow users to: • Analyze the substance of anti-CRT efforts, including (a), the type of conduct that is restricted or required; (b), the institution targeted for regulation; (c), the specific features of the conduct being targeted; and (d), enforcement mechanisms used to regulate the conduct. • Go beyond a focus on state and federal legislation to include local government activity and nonlegislative actions, such as regulations, executive directives, and the opinions of attorneys general—all in a single location. • Track patterns and find information relevant to their purposes through interactive filters.

An early finding of the Tracking Project is that antiCRT activity is more extensive than previously reported. Although media reporting often focuses on anti-CRT measures in traditionally conservative states, the Tracking Project has revealed, through its enhanced comprehensive scope, that 49 states have proposed antiCRT activity.

CRT Forward’s Tracking Taifha Natalee Alexander ’21 Project is made possible by a dedicated leadership team comprising Alexander, Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Professor in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Cheryl I. Harris, Assistant Professor LaToya Baldwin Clark, Professor Noah Zatz and CRS Executive Director Jasleen Kohli. Additionally, the team includes undergraduate and law school research assistants, as well as law librarians.

The CRT Forward leadership team is deeply committed to broadening the accessibility of the data and encouraging the rigorous analysis of findings by engaging wide and diverse audiences. This summer, members of the team hosted an inaugural event: Mapping Anti-CRT Politics. Alexander, Harris, and Baldwin Clark shared data trends, including connections between traditionally nonpartisan school board elections and the pervasiveness of the anti-CRT disinformation campaign.

Harris notes that the Tracking Project offers a unique opportunity to disseminate the scholarship and research of CRS, saying, “CRT Forward is our first real foray into taking some of the ideas that we have and bringing them into the level of helping policymakers, litigators and ordinary people with some of the framing and information that they need in order to deal with the on-the-ground circumstances that they’re facing.”

Along with the Tracking Project, CRT Forward will continue to develop substantial resources for the advancement of new ideas and legal tools to support antiracist education, training and research. “We need CRT to understand this assault on racial justice, where even naming structural racism gets portrayed as unfair to white people,” says Zatz. “And we need CRT to develop legal theories of education and free speech that not only blunt these attacks but place antiracism at the center of a democratic society.” For more information, and to learn about the project, visit crtforward.org.

REIMAGINING HUMAN RIGHTS WITH CRT AND TWAIL: MATERIALS FOR RACIAL JUSTICE ADVOCACY

This spring saw the realization of a much-lauded project from the Promise Institute for Human Rights: the launch of its Race & Human Rights Reimagined Initiative. A resource for academics, students, scholars and activists, the initiative offers a catalog of materials designed for people working on racial justice issues at any level who wish to adopt an international human rights frame in their work.

The initiative is the culmination of efforts by core Promise faculty E. Tendayi Achiume and Aslı Ü. Bâli with the institute’s newest hire, Racial Justice Policy Counsel S. Priya Morley. Together, they spearheaded events and materials on an interdisciplinary and critical approach to engaging with international law and human rights, particularly by combining critical race theory (CRT) and Third World approaches to international law (TWAIL) to dismantle structural racism and the continuing impacts of colonialism around the world.

Describing how they arrived at this work, Bâli and Achiume recounted similar experiences in their legal educations and early careers. Each had perceived a marked dissonance between the field of law as usually taught in academic settings and their own lived experiences.

Bâli noted, “As a student, I was drawn by emancipatory projects, particularly in the Middle East. But the region I was most interested in was made up of states cast as rogue actors, treated as resistant to change, and pathologized. In contrast, my own engagement with the region as a young adult told an entirely different story: I was constantly among populations grappling with the aftermath of profoundly traumatic histories of colonization and who were systematically the subjects of further imperial intervention. When I got to law school, I wanted a vocabulary to help me engage with the character of these ongoing imperial projects that were everywhere obscured.”

“My journey is similar to Professor Bâli’s in many ways,” said Achiume. “Mine was a difficult journey—trying to make sense of law’s relationship to the things I care about yet struggling to fully articulate dynamics playing out in the world with the existing legal vocabulary. When starting my career, I intended to work as a South African lawyer for refugees and asylum seekers. Following xenophobic violence in the country in 2008, I was challenged to describe the racialized nature of the harms my clients and others were subjected to. Grappling with that took me on my path to an academic context, to UCLA, where I had the good fortune to be surrounded by CRT theorists and then exposed to TWAIL scholarship. Along the way I felt my world being transformed. Finding these two disciplines has opened doors.”

Morley, reflecting on her own research and work in human rights and migration, noted that “an approach informed by CRT and TWAIL provides human rights scholars and practitioners with tools to describe what many people who experience intersecting marginalization already know to be true, but which so much of law and legal theory doesn’t capture.” Morley’s creation of materials on this area of scholarship for UCLA Law students and others is intended to be an entry point for people interested in learning more.

Promise Executive Director Kate Mackintosh said, “The Race & Human Rights Reimagined Initiative is at the core of what Promise aims to do—support deep and critical thinking about urgent human rights issues, while connecting with people outside of academia and law. I hope the resources are useful and salient for anyone thinking about racial justice and human rights.”

The questions about inequality, international law and human rights being explored by TWAIL, CRT and human rights scholars are important ones for anyone trying to make sense of the world. As Bâli stressed, UCLA Law is uniquely positioned to support this work: “Perhaps the luckiest break I’ve had in my career was coming to UCLA where I could figure out how to address the questions which I was told were out of bounds.”

E. Tendayi Achiume

Aslı Ü. Bâli

S. Priya Morley

ADDRESSING GLOBAL WARMING

The Governors’ Climate and Forests Task Force is now based at UCLA’s Emmett Institute

According to the World Resources Institute, the tropics lost more than 27 million acres of forest cover in 2021 alone—an area about the size of Guatemala—including more than 9 million acres of tropical primary forests. That’s equivalent to a rate of about 10 football fields a minute. Losing tropical forests has devastating consequences for local communities as well as for biodiversity, habitat and climate change. In fact, the United Nations Environment Program estimates that global deforestation and forest degradation contribute 11% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

One organization focused on this enormous challenge is the Governors’ Climate and Forests (GCF) Task Force, a network of 39 states and provinces in 10 countries—Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Indonesia, Ivory Coast, Mexico, Nigeria, Peru, Spain and the United States—working to protect tropical forests, reduce greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, and take large-scale action on this global humanitarian, economic and ecological crisis. In July 2022, UCLA Law’s Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability (IoES) became the home of the GCF Task Force, which is led by William Boyd, the Michael J. Klein Chair in Law, a professor at IoES, and the faculty co-director of the Emmett Institute.

Boyd has been involved with the GCF Task Force since the initiative was launched by former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2008. The group had been based at the University of Colorado, Boulder (where Boyd was a professor), which will continue to support the network through a sub-award from UCLA. “It’s exciting and fitting that the GCF Task Force is back in California where it started,” Boyd says. The group has also been supported for many years by the government of Norway and other partners.

The task force’s move to UCLA coincided with the naming of a project director, Jason Gray, and the launch of a focused effort to integrate, enhance, and leverage UCLA’s broader expertise on tropical forest research and policy through coordination with the law school, IoES, the Center for Tropical Research and the Congo Basin Institute, among others. This integration of efforts within UCLA is expected to provide opportunities for students at the law school and beyond to gain valuable experience and support university-to-university collaborations within GCF Task Force member jurisdictions.

The mission of the GCF Task Force “is to empower state and provincial leaders to implement innovative jurisdictional programs that protect tropical forests and promote low-emissions development.” The task force connects these government leaders with civil society, the private sector, Indigenous peoples, local communities and other stakeholders to share experiences, mobilize technical and legal assistance and unlock financial support to protect forests and address climate change.

A key element of the GCF Task Force approach is reducing inequality, critically important to emerging economies. “The climate crisis and the inequality crisis are the same crisis,” Boyd says. “The only way to save forests is to build a new forest economy that provides meaningful livelihoods and economic opportunity for all people and communities. This can only be built on homegrown, local knowledge, innovation and applied problem solving.”

This means the GCF Task Force’s efforts focus closely on local economies and local needs. “Each of our member states and provinces understands its own context better than outside experts,” says Gray. “So we work to support them in developing additional partnerships and actions within these communities. Deforestation affects the world as a whole, but it’s people at the local and regional level who can turn ideas into action, and action into results.”

Earlier this year, a meeting of the GCF Task Force in Manaus, Brazil, led to the creation of a new policy framework, two years in the making, that outlines steps for each jurisdiction in the network to achieve an ambitious goal of reducing tropical deforestation by at least 80% by the end of this decade. A few examples of actions designed to achieve this goal are public-private partnerships to encourage zero-deforestation commodities such as palm oil and beef, the recognizing and enforcing of Indigenous land tenure rights, innovative bioeconomy programs, assessment of carbon market opportunities, and the combating of illegal forest clearing. Says Gray, “Supporting our member states and provinces to implement their tailored jurisdictional strategies to reduce deforestation will have far-reaching and beneficial impacts, both locally and globally.”

Boyd acknowledges that reducing deforestation demands long-term investment. “Reducing deforestation requires capital from wealthy countries,” he says. “But there is potentially a substantial return on that investment in multiple dimensions: reducing the impact of global warming, preserving the world’s biodiversity, protecting the rights of Indigenous peoples and local communities and increasing the economic possibilities for people in emerging economies.” (continued on page 24)

William Boyd Jason Gray

NEW CLINIC REPRESENTS AFGHAN ASYLUM SEEKERS

Full-semester clinic continues the work of J-Term miniclinic

Third-year UCLA Law student Eimile Nolan decided on law school in part because she saw crises playing out in the news and wondered what she could do to help. When she learned that the law school was offering a short-term project during the 2022 January term to help Afghan evacuees seeking asylum, she signed up right away. After the success of the J-Term miniclinic, which conducted intake interviews for 10 individuals with the goal of referring them for representation by the local nonprofit Human Rights First, Nolan and three other students went on to represent two asylum applicants as part of a new, advanced clinic offered in the 2022 spring semester. The cases were heard by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) at the end of the semester. This fall, both clients and their law student representatives were elated to learn that USCIS approved their cases. According to Nina Rabin, the director of the Immigrant Family Legal Clinic, who organized and oversaw the J-Term project and the advanced clinic, the law school responded quickly when the possibility arose to continue representing some of the J-Term clients. UCLA Law arranged for course credit and provided a faculty appointment to an additional supervising attorney, Laura Diamond, a Los Angeles–area immigration Law students Rose Chute, Julia Anderson, and their client lawyer. “It was great,” says Rabin, “to see the law school mobilize to get an urgently needed, targeted new clinic off the ground rapidly.”

Trauma-informed lawyering

According to Nolan, students in the J-Term miniclinic spent a significant amount of time training before conducting a single screening interview of each evacuee.

In contrast, the advanced clinic students in the spring semester met with their clients about once a week and prepared an extensive brief and supporting declarations and materials before representing the clients in all-day interviews with USCIS. The cases were part of a program initiated to streamline asylum hearings of Afghan evacuees displaced after the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021.

Among those represented in the advanced clinic were a women’s rights advocate and a high-ranking official in the former Afghan government. Nolan and a partner worked with the women’s rights advocate.

In an asylum case, the applicant must show that they have a well-founded fear of persecution if forced to return to their country of origin. Nolan says it was sometimes challenging to draw out the client’s story and form it into a declaration in her own words, with the help of an interpreter.

It took several interviews, Nolan says, for the client to become comfortable speaking with the students about her experiences. During one session, Nolan and her partner examined photos of the client working with women in rural Afghanistan. Hearing the client describe the photos and speak about the encouragement she gave to the women to work and be independent was a turning point for the clinic team.

The clinic also taught Nolan about more prosaic real-life lawyering skills in systems like immigration that haven’t completely switched to electronic filing. On the day the brief had to be postmarked, in advance of the asylum interview, she says she ran across campus with a thick envelope stuffed with the brief and declarations to make it to the post office before it closed: “It was the first time I felt like a real lawyer!”

Nina Rabin, director of the Immigrant Family Legal Clinic

Clinic continues in fall semester

Rabin says the clinic has provided an opportunity for students to make a small contribution to the vast undertaking of helping thousands of Afghan evacuees find stability and security as they begin moving on with their lives in a new country. The clinic has taken one new case during the fall semester, and Rabin hopes it will be able to continue working with Afghan evacuees as long as there is a need.

Nolan says she was attracted to UCLA Law because it offered a variety of options within public interest law. She says she wasn’t thinking about immigration law as a career path until she worked with the clinic. Now, she says, “if I did this forever, I’d be happy with it.”

LAW FOR NONLAWYERS: M.L.S. grads put their training to work

“Think like a lawyer without being a lawyer.”

That’s a big part of the goal of UCLA’s Master of Legal Studies Program, introduced in 2020, which was designed for working professionals who need a solid understanding of the law and its application in their businesses and organizations. As the M.L.S. program enters its third full year, Assistant Dean Jason Fiske says that its graduates are already making their mark in business, nonprofit organizations and the entertainment and sports sectors. “Graduates of the program are putting their legal training to work,” he says. “Most of the students have great real-world experience when they come into this program, and their experience here makes them even more well prepared to succeed.”

In fact, M.L.S. graduates learn about the law and its applications in ways that are immediately useful to them in their careers, as these stories of recent graduates attest.

“Could propel me further on my career path.”

For David Holtkamp ’21, the M.L.S. degree was key to landing his current job as a human resources director at National Geographic. “The Employment Law course is directly relevant to my work,” he says. “National Geographic uses a lot of independent contractors, like photographers shooting wildlife in Africa or digital artists creating content for specific stories. My coursework definitely enhanced my knowledge of employment law and HR compliance.”

Holtkamp enrolled in the program because he wanted to distinguish himself from his peers. “A lot of HR professionals have certifications like PHR [Professional in Human Resources] or SHRM-CP [Society for Human Resources Management–Certified Professional],” he says. “I knew that an advanced degree from a distinguished law school could propel me further on my career path.”

“Challenging and rigorous—but rewarding.”

For Ryan Carter ’22, the M.L.S. program was challenging, but the outcome was “rewarding,” he says, both for his work—Carter is an editor at the Southern California News Group, focusing on metro news and politics—and for himself personally. “I discovered new research techniques that helped me in my work,” he says. “I learned a lot more about how the legal system works and got much more attuned to the impact of legal questions as a leader in my organization and in the substance of the content we publish. And just getting through it all tapped some newfound confidence in myself.”

Carter adds that “the solidarity with classmates was huge,” and says, “The diversity of our cohort, in terms of professional and life experience, was among the most valuable aspect of the program.” Carter was chosen by his classmates as the M.L.S. spokesperson at the 2021–22 graduation in June.

Top row: Anet Sinanyan, Chester Rodeheaver, Christina Choy, Jason Schaeffer, Karen Wolcott; Bottom row: Michelle Edgar, Eduardo Miranda, Christine Shaw, Brent Martin, Maddy Mestman

“…a better understanding of legal concepts…”

Trioscope Studios in Florida is an award-winning producer of filmed entertainment that fuses live action and animation and has created a technology platform for its brand of “enhanced hybrid animation.” Trioscope’s chief financial officer, Chester Rodeheaver ’21, sought the M.L.S. degree because he constantly works with in-house lawyers and outside legal teams. “As I moved into upper management, I realized I needed a better understanding of legal concepts,” he says. “At the M.L.S. program, I learned a lot about copyrights, nondisclosure agreements, contracts, publicity rights, patent law, and even nonfungible tokens. I’m on the phone with lawyers every day, and now I have a lot more insight into what they’re saying and how Trioscope should move forward.”

Rodeheaver, who completed the program in three semesters (two remotely from Miami and one on campus in Los Angeles), also found the experience to be a great networking opportunity. “I left the program with a great group of friends,” he says, “and even hired two people I met during the M.L.S. program to work with Trioscope.”

“I’m using the skills I learned in the M.L.S. program every day.”

That’s how Michelle Edgar ’22 describes one of the biggest benefits of earning her M.L.S. degree at UCLA Law. With a background in music marketing—she was a former vice president at Epic Records and is currently head of strategic partnerships at LiveOne Media in Santa Monica—Edgar enrolled in the program to acquire “more tools and better skill sets” that could help her be more effective in structuring deals in the entertainment industry. “I knew an understanding of the law would be great as I pursue my career,” she says, “and would help me pivot to a new sector—sports and NIL [name, image and likeness deals for athletes].” Edgar also recently co-launched SoundBytes Collective to help build community among innovative marketers, and founded Music Unites, a nonprofit supporting music education, and the XX Project, a network of female leaders.

Edgar acknowledges that it wasn’t easy to work at her job and complete the degree at the same time—“It was one of the hardest things I ever did”—but she found a lot of support in the community of other M.L.S. students: “This really broadened my worldview.”

According to Russell Korobkin, the interim dean of the law school, the Master of Legal Studies Program represents another avenue through which UCLA Law fulfills its mission of using legal education to create the next generation’s leaders. “Having a solid working knowledge of the law is a tremendous asset for ambitious people in all kinds of business and nonprofit sectors,” he says. “The interest in our approach to the M.L.S. is rising, and we expect the degree to become an important component of our offerings to students and to society.”