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Latino Voices RisingDIVERSE PERSPECTIVES ON THE LAW

Harvard Latino Law Conference

Wasserstein Hall, Harvard Law School, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Milstein WestBreakfast

Milstein West ABWelcome from La Alianza

Faculty Address Assistant Professor of Law, Harvard Law School

Milstein West ABLatinas in Leadership: A Showcase of Careers Across Industries

Partner at Sidley Austin LLP—New York Senior Staff Attorney, Massachusetts Law Reform Institute and Award Winning Writer

Co-Founder of BeVisible and DevelopHer

Milstein West AB Lunch ProvidedVoting Rights Litigation and the Effect on Latino Voters

KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Vice President of Litigation, Mexican American Legal Defense andEducational Fund (MALDEF)

Wasserstein 2004Critical Race Theory: An Examination of Race in the Law

Emerita Professor of Law, University of New Mexico School of Law, Professor of Law, Loyola University Chicago School of Law

Milstein WestCoffee Break

Milstein West ABLeading from the Bench: Latino Judges in the US

, Judge for the US District Court of the Central District of CaliforniaFormer Judge for the Massachusetts Superior Court

Milstein West AB Dinner ProvidedTable Talks: Discussion on Diversifying the Legal Profession

Milstein West ABIncreasing the Pipeline of Latino Students in Law School

KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Founder and Chairperson, For People of Color, Inc.

Harkness South Glass Reception AreaClosing Reception

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P A R T I C I P A N T S

Andrew Manuel CrespoAssistant Professor of Law, Harvard Law School

Andrew Manuel Crespo is an Assistant Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, where he teaches criminal law and criminal procedure.  Professor Crespo’s research focuses on the institutional design and administration of the criminal justice system, with a focus on the capacity of courts to regu-late law enforcement behavior.

Prior to beginning his academic career, Professor Crespo served as a Staff Attorney with the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, where he represented adults and juveniles charged with serious felonies in the local court system, ranging from armed robberies, to burglaries, to homicides.  Professor Crespo graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 2008, where he served as president of the Harvard Law Re-view, the first Latino to hold that position.  Following law school, Professor Crespo served for three years as a law clerk, initially to Judge Stephen Re-inhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, then to Associate Justice Stephen Breyer of the U.S. Supreme Court, and finally to Associate Justice Elena Kagan during her inaugural term on the Court.

Maria MelendezPartner, Sidley Austin LLP

Maria Melendez is a litigation partner in Sidley’s New York office. Her practice focuses primarily on complex commercial litigation representing U.S. and non-U.S. clients in state and federal courts throughout the U.S. and in domes-tic and international arbitration matters. She litigates cases and handles arbi-tration proceedings involving allegations of fraud, breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty, and other business torts. Her litigation experience includes defending public companies, investment banks, broker-dealers, directors and officers, and corporate issuers in actions arising under the federal securities laws and pharmaceutical companies in products liability cases. Her practice also includes representing entities and individuals in investigations conduct-ed by regulators, including the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Maria is a member and Vice Chair of the Board of Directors of LatinoJus-tice PRLDEF, and serves on the Board’s Executive Committee. LatinoJustice PRLDEF, established in 1972, has won landmark civil rights cases in educa-tion, housing, voting, migrant, immigrant, employment and other civil rights. From 2003 to July 2007, Maria served on the Board of Directors of Her Justice, Inc. (formerly inMotion, Inc.), a public service organization that provides free legal services to low-income women in New York City seek-ing protection from batterers, custody of their children, child support, and a safe place to live. Today, she continues to serve as Sidley’s representative to Her Justice, and handles cases on behalf of Her Justice clients.

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Iris GomezSenior Staff Attorney, Massachusetts Law Reform Institute

Iris Gomez joined MLRI as an immigration attorney in March 1992. She is a nationally-recognized expert on asylum and immigration law, and directs MLRI’s Immigrants Protection Project. Prior to joining MLRI, she was a Senior Attorney at Greater Boston Legal Services. She also worked as a law school lecturer, a public defender, a farm worker lawyer, and has been the Chair of the Board of Directors of the National Immigration Law Center. She graduated from Boston University School of Law.

In 1999, Gomez received the Massachusetts Bar Association’s Legal Ser-vices Award. This award honors an attorney employed by a public or non-profit agency who has provided civil legal services to low-income clients, and who has made a particularly significant or meaningful contribution to the provision of low-income legal services, above and beyond the require-ments of her position. In 2002, she received the Massachusetts Associa-tion of Hispanic Attorneys’ “Las Primeras Award,” which honors prominent women who have uniquely contributed to the Latino community through their vision and leadership.

Iris Gomez is the author of two poetry collections and the recipient of a prestigious national poetry prize. Born in Cartagena, Columbia, she now lives in the Boston area.

Andrea GuendelmanCo-founder of BeVisible and DevelopHer, Adjunct Faculty University of Colo-rado Law

Andrea is the co-founder of BeVisible and DevelopHer. BeVisible.soy is a social media platform for US Latinas, particularly millennials. BeVisible connects Latinas with peers and mentors and with career and educational opportunities.

Her goal is to ignite a transformation in the entrepreneurship communities by making it more diverse and inclusive. Andrea co-organized Common Pitch Chile, where over three days more than 10,000 participants gathered in Santiago Chile to learn about social entrepreneurship with the partici-pation of Al Gore and music by Devendra Banhart and Devotchka among others. Andrea’s second event, SP Women, focused on women in the startup community.

Andrea received her law degrees from the University of Chile and Harvard Law School.  She had a long career as an attorney in New York (Debevoise & Plimpton), DC (Office of the General Counsel of the Export Import Bank of the United States) and New Mexico (Sutin, Thayer, & Browne). Before practicing law she was the Associate Director of the Center for the Ad-vancement of Hispanics in Science and Engineering Education.

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Nina PeralesVice President of Litigation at the Mexican American Legal

Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF)

Nina Perales is a leading civil rights litigator in the US and an expert on a range of issues, including immigrants’ rights, voting rights, and redis-tricting litigation. She is the Vice President of Litigation for MALDEF, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. In that role, Perales supervises the legal staff and litigation docket in MALDEF’s offices throughout the United States. Perales is best known for her work in voting rights, including redistricting and vote dilution cases. Her litigation has included successful statewide redistricting cases in Texas and Arizona as well as LULAC v. Perry, the Latino challenge to Texas 2003 congressional re-districting, which she led through trial and argued successfully in the U.S. Supreme Court. She also specializes in immigrants’ rights litigation, includ-ing leading cases striking down anti-immigrant laws in Farmers Branch, Texas and recovering civil damages from violent vigilantes.

Ms. Perales received her Bachelor’s degree from Brown University and earned her J.D. from Columbia University School of Law.

Margaret E. MontoyaEmerita Professor of Law at University of New Mexico School of Law

Margaret Montoya was the first Latina accepted to Harvard Law School and graduated with a JD from the institution in 1978. She has been a member of the UNM law school faculty since 1992 and has taught courses in constitutional rights, torts, contracts, clinical law and employment law, and in her seminars, she examines issues of race, ethnicity, gender, culture and language. From 2003-2005, she was interim director of the Southwest Hispanic Research Institute, established in 1980 for the study of the His-panic experience in the Southwest. She holds a secondary appointment in the center’s Department of Community and Family Health and has been a member of the UNM School of Medicine’s admission committee for its Combined BA/MD Degree program.

Montoya’s scholarship appears in law reviews, anthologies and casebooks and is used in many high school, undergraduate, graduate and law school courses throughout the United States. Her best-known article, Mascaras, Trenzas y Greñas: Un/Masking the Self While Un/Braiding Latina Stories and Legal Discourse, connects autobiographical narratives with legal analysis and focuses on resisting the cultural assimilation that often comes with higher education. She was the lead scholar of a comprehensive American Bar Association initiative that analyzed a broad set of information aimed at advancing racial/ethnic, gender, disability and sexual orientation diversity within the legal profession. The result of the two-year effort, “Diversity in the Legal Profession: Next Steps” was released in April 2010.

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Montoya has been recognized by her professional peers and by the Latina/o community for her work. In 2009, the CUNY School of Law named her the Haywood Burns Chair in Civil Rights. She is the recipient of the prestigious Clyde Ferguson Award, given annually by law professors of color for accomplishments in scholarship, teaching and service. She has received honors from National Latina/o Law Students Association, UNM’s Graduate and Professional Students of Color, the New Mexico Hispano Round Table, the Hispanic Business Magazine, and Albany Law School.

Montoya has been married to UNM Mathematics Professor Charles Boyer for 30 years.  They have two daughters, Diana and Alejandra, and a step-son, Charles.

Juan F. PereaProfessor of Law at Loyola University Chicago School of Law

Juan Perea joined Loyola University Chicago’s full-time law faculty in 2011. Prior to joining Loyola, he was the Cone, Wagner, Nugent, Johnson, Hazouri & Roth Professor of Law at the University of Florida Levin College of Law. He has also served as a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, Boston College Law School, and the University of Colorado School of Law.  During the 2012-13 academic year, he was the Lee Distinguished Chair in Constitutional Law at John Marshall Law School.  In 2011, he was the Reus-chlein Distinguished Visiting Professor at Villanova Law School.  Perea has written extensively on racial inequality, the legal history of race relations in the United States, and the civil rights of Latinos.  His articles have appeared in Harvard Law Review, California Law Review, New York University Law Review, Michigan Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Minnesota Law Review and William and Mary Law Review, among others.   Upon graduation from law school, he clerked for the Hon. Bruce M. Selya, U.S. Court of Appeals, First Circuit. He joined the Boston law firm Ropes & Gray, where he special-ized in labor and employment law.  In addition to his experience in private practice, he spent a year as an attorney for the National Labor Relations Board (Region One). He has testified as an expert before the U.S. Senate, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the U.S. Com-mission on Civil Rights.

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Judge Fernando OlguinUnited States District Judge for the Central District of California

The Honorable Fernando Olguin is a United States District Judge for the United States District Court for the Central District of California. Judge Ol-guin earned his bachelors degree from Harvard University in 1985 and his J.D. and LLM from UC Berkeley School of Law in 1989.

After law school Judge Olguin clerked for Judge Charles Andrew Muecke of the United States District Court for the District of Arizona.  He then went on to work as a trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division at the United States Department of Justice from 1991 to 1994. He was the education program director at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund from 1994 to 1995.

 Judge Olguin was also partner at the law firm Traber, Voorhees, & Olguin, California from 1995 to 2001 where he did housing and employment work.

 He became a federal magistrate judge for the Central District of California in 2001 and served until 2012 when he was appointed as a United States District Judge by President Barack Obama. 

Judge Isaac BorensteinJudge Isaac Borenstein (ret.) currently serves as a full-time Visiting Pro-fessor of Law at Suffolk Law School in Boston, MA. His courses include Evidence, Criminal Procedure, Conflicts of Law (co-taught), and a seminar on Cuba and its changing economy (also co-taught). As part of the Cuba seminar he has lead two groups of 24 law students each, during the last two Januarys, for a week of classes with Cuban students and professors at the University of Havana School of Law. He also teaches in Suffolk’s sum-mer program at the University of Lund, Sweden. He was a judge on the Mass. Superior Court, the state’s major trial court, where for 16 years

he tried many serious felonies and civil cases; he was also a judge on the Lawrence District Court for 6 years, where he also tried numerous civil and criminal cases. He has taught on a part time and full time basis for many decades, at several law schools, and he has received numerous awards for teaching excellence, as well as for his work on the bench. Since 2008 he has continued his work as a trial and appellate lawyer, mediator and arbitrator. He is a native of La Habana, Cuba, arriving in the U.S. in 1961 just short of his 11th birthday.

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Anthony Solana, Jr.Founder and Chairperson of For People of Color, Inc.

Anthony Solana, Jr. is the founder, president, and chairperson of For People of Color, Inc. He is the author of “A Guide to the Law School Ap-plication Process For People of Color” and “A Guide to the Bar Examination For People of Color.” Anthony has served as the Chairperson of the Equal Justice Society and member of the State Bar of California’s Council on Access and Fairness. Both the La Raza Law Students Association of UCLA School of Law and the Greenlining Institute Academy Alumni Association have recognized him as their “Alumnus of the Year.” The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund awarded Anthony with its Excellence in Legal Service Award. The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area recognized Anthony’s extraordinary contribution to their asylum program via the Father Cuchulain Moriarity Award.

Anthony received his Juris Doctor from UCLA School of Law where he served as the Co-Chair of the Seventh Annual National Latina/o Law Stu-dent Conference and was a founding member of the National Latina/o Law Student Association. Anthony also founded For People of Color, Inc. during his first year in law school. He received his B.A. in Political Science and History, with honors, from the University of California, Berkeley and was the first person in his family to attain a college degree and Juris Doc-tor. Anthony, however, is proudest of the fact that he was born and raised in East Los Angeles, California.