Staff 2007-2009

2007-09 Editorial Board

Faculty Editors: Jerry Kang and Saul Sarabia

Editors-in-Chief: Nina Farnia and Hentyle Yapp

Content Editors: Rohini Khanna, Ashwini Mate, Sarah Paule

Assistant Editors: Aziz Ahmad, Marissa Dagdagan, Katie Ojeda Stewart, Alicia Virani, Jason Wu

Editors' Bios

Aziz Ahmad

Aziz received his Bachelors degree in Economics and Political Science from the University of Maryland, College Park.  While there, he served as a research assistant at the Center for Institutional Reform and the Informal Sector, studying corruption and human trafficking.  After graduating, he spent nearly three years as a legislative assistant for the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington DC, lobbying on federal civil rights and criminal justice legislation. While at the ACLU, Aziz focused on racial profiling, mandatory minimum sentencing, and voting rights. His most lasting contribution was his work in the recent reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, helping guarantee the right to vote for millions of minority Americans. He continues to be engaged on issues of racial justice and intends to pursue a career in public interest law. Aziz is currently a second year student at the UCLA School of Law.

Marissa Dagdagan

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Nina Farnia

Nina is a fourth year student at UCLA, pursuing a law degree and an MA in urban planning.  She graduated from the University of Chicago in 2002 with a degree in political science and international relations.  After college, she worked in Iran at Badjens (www.badjens.com), an Iranian feminist online journal, before returning to Chicago to be a community organizer at the Southwest Youth Collaborative and the Arab American Action Network.  Nina's currently writing her master's thesis on the racialization of foreign policy, with a particular look at US/Iran relations and the impact of those relations on Iranian Americans in southern California.  After graduating, Nina will be working at the Impact Fund in Berkeley, California.  Having received an Equal Justice Works fellowship, she will be coordinating a project that aims to challenge post-9/11 racial profiling policies through class action impact litigation, done in conjunction with community organizing.  In addition to legal advocacy, she plans to pursue a career in law teaching.  She loves traveling, eating, dancing, writing and graduating.  Nina was born and raised in Oklahoma, and will always be an Oklahoman at heart.

Jerry Kang

Prof. Kang, elected Professor of the Year in 1998 and winner of the Rutter Award for Teaching Excellence in 2007, writes on race, communications and their intersection.  On race, he has focused on the Asian American community and on the legal implications of recent discoveries in social cognition.  He is a co-author of Race, Rights, and Reparation: The Law and the Japanese American Internment (Aspen 2001).  On communications, he has published interdisciplinary articles on information privacy, pervasive computing, and mass media policy.  He is also the author of Communications Law & Policy (2d ed. Foundation 2005).  At the nexus of these fields, he has published two groundbreaking articles in the Harvard Law Review about how race is constructed in cyberspace (Cyber-race 2000) and how FCC media policy inadvertently exacerbates implicit bias (Trojan Horses of Race 2005).  He teaches Asian American Jurisprudence in the CRS curriculum.

Rohini Khanna

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Ashwini Mate

Ashwini Mate is a third year law student at UCLA School of Law.Ashwini graduated from Wesleyan University in 2003 with a B.A. in both English and American Studies, concentraing in Ethnic Studies.After graduation, she worked as a part-time paralegal in New Jersey and New York at both a health insurance fraud firm and a personal injury firm before moving to New York to work full-time as a paralegal for the US Attorney’s Office, EDNY. After a year and half at the US Attorney’s Office, she was a paralegal at a small private public interest firm working with children in the foster care system, Lansner & Kubitschek. After receiving her acceptance letter to UCLA, she left New York for Los Angeles. During her first law school summer, Ashwini was an extern for Judge Audrey Collins in the Central District of California. Currently, Ashwini participates in many journals and clinics on campus, including her role as Chief Managing Editor for the Indigenous People’s Journal of Law, Culture and Resistance. She is also a Comments Editor for the Asian Pacific American Law Journal. She dedicates most of her time towards her clinical work in the Tribal Legal Development Clinic. This past summer, Ashwini moved once again to San Francisco to work for the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights.

Katie Ojeda Stewart

Katie Ojeda Stewart is a local Los Angeles community organizer with INCITE! L.A. and a second-year law student at UCLA enrolled in the Critical Race Studies Specialization and the Epstein Program in Public Interest Law and Policy.  Originally from a small town in south- eastern Ohio, Katie made the move to California over three years ago after graduating from The Ohio State University with a double major in Comparative Ethnic and American Studies and Spanish.  Upon arriving in California, she first made a home for herself in San Francisco where she attained her Master’s Degree in Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University.  Her work there focused on analyzing the power of language in constructing welfare policy, the way in which legislative debates produce and reinscribe myths about immigrant communities, and the subsequent effects welfare policy has on immigrant women of color.  Her thesis argued that the political agenda of the 1996 Personal Responsibility Work and Opportunity Reconciliation Act, otherwise known as the reform that “end[ed] welfare as we know it,” is a project of state-sponsored economic violence.  It was during her master’s program that she was first introduced to INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence and at the end of 2007 after relocating to Los Angeles for law school, several women and herself resurrected the L.A. chapter of INCITE! and they have been actively organizing since that date.  This past summer Katie interned at the Harriet Buahi Center for Family Law, where she provided direct legal services to women surviving domestic violence.  Additionally, Katie worked in Lynwood jail as part of her summer position with the Mothers Behind Bars Project, which is a legal education program pertaining to dependency court, domestic violence, and paternity issues.  As part of her work, Katie took part in the classes each week and also helped to facilitate communication between the mothers in the program and their DCFS social workers.  After finishing law school, Katie plans on continuing with anti-violence work by engaging in direct legal services work, community organizing and movement building.

Sarah Paule

Sarah Paule is a third year law student in the Epstein Program in Public Interest Law & Policy and the Critical Race Studies Specialization. In addition to being a Content Editor for CRS Online, she is also Co-Chair of the Homelessness Prevention Clinic and Assistant Student Note Editor for the Journal of Sexual Orientation & Gender Identity Law. Sarah spent last summer working at Equality Advocates, a civil rights organization in Philadelphia that provides free legal services to the LGBTQ community throughout Pennsylvania. While there, her work focused primarily on the discrimination of transgender and gender-variant individuals. This past summer Sarah worked at Legal Aid Society of New York’s Juvenile Rights Division, where she worked to challenge the increasing criminalization of youth. After getting her B.A. from NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Studies, with a concentration in “Sexual Rights & the Construction of Social Norms,” Sarah worked in Oaxaca and Chiapas, Mexico, trying to deny the fact that she was thinking of going to law school. After accepting her fate, she worked for various public interest law firms and social justice organizations, focusing her energy on juvenile rights, before finally enrolling at UCLA. Sarah loves: when people articulate thoughts she is struggling to express and when people laugh aloud. Sarah does not love: when she tells people she grew up in Hong Kong and they say, “But, you don’t look Chinese” and when people tell her to show her teeth when she smiles. Sarah is very excited about CRS Online and thinks you should be too!

Saul Sarabia

Prof. Sarabia focuses on community-based social justice advocacy, strategizing with community residents to include their voice in law-making and public policy reform.  Since graduating from UCLA Law in 1996, his efforts have ranged from documenting human rights violations in Central American countries to community organizing with poor people on welfare and the foster care system in South Los Angeles.  He teaches Critical Race Theory and Latinos/as and the Law in the CRS Curriculum, while coordinating the CRS Program's public symposia, panel presentations and collaborations with civil rights and community organizations.

Alicia Virani

Alicia Virani is a second year student at UCLA School of Law.  She graduated from Vassar College in 2005 with a major in International Studies and minors in French and Women's Studies.  At Vassar, she started Intersextions, an organization for LGBTQ people of color.  After graduating, she took a position at an alternative high school program in Queens where she led a young women's group and worked with them on an organizing project focused on increasing access to STD testing and sex education in Queens.  She also worked as the LGBTQ Consultant for the Safe Homes Project, helping them to develop their services for LGBTQ survivors of domestic violence and partner abuse.  Currently, at UCLA she is enrolled in the Epstein Program in Public Interest Law and Policy and the Critical Races Studies Specialization.  She is also pursuing a joint degree, to obtain a Masters in Urban Planning.  Her interests are varied, but she is mostly focused on the intersections of legal practice and community organizing, envisioning alternatives to prison, and environmental justice issues in urban communities of color.  Outside of law school, because she believes there are many glorious things to engage in outside of the institution's walls, she is an artist.  She is in the beginning phases of starting up her own hand-made jewelry business.  She loves photography and creating abstract art.  She also is a political burlesque performer and has performed in NYC.  Alicia recently co-founded an LA chapter of INCITE!, an organization dedicated to ending both interpersonal and state-sanctioned violence against women of color.

Jason Wu

Jason Wu is a first year law student, class of 2010. He is from New York City, and grew up in both Brooklyn and Queens. He received his B.A. from Vassar College in 2007, where he graduated with departmental honors. At Vassar, he constructed his own independent major in comparative Ethnic Studies. His senior thesis was titled, “Shame” Inside/Out: Transnational Queer Asian Identities in Contemporary Cinema. Academic interests include: transnationalism, diaspora, migration, cultural citizenship, cultural production, API Literature/Film, critical race theory, queer studies, and post-colonial studies.  Prior to law school, Jason worked for the New York Taxi Workers’ Alliance. He was also heavily involved with student activism and organizing while at Vassar.

Hentyle Yapp

Hentyle enjoys reading, cooking, hiking and Critical Race Theory. After graduating from Brown University with a degree in French Literature and Premedical studies, he worked as a performer and choreographer with dance companies in Asia and New York City. Currently, Hentyle is active in the CRS program as a managing editor for CRS Online and organizer for the annual CRS Symposium. Last summer, Hentyle externed in the chambers of the Honorable Judge Edward M. Chen in the Northern District Court of California. This following summer, he will be externing with the Office of the Public Defender. Hentyle is humbled to be working with the amazing faculty and students of the CRS Program.