9th Annual Shaping Justice Conference: Public Interest Lawyering in the Age of the Roberts Court

Shaping Justice
Friday, February 7, 2025 11:30 - Friday, February 7, 2025 15:30

Vincent Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, will deliver the keynote address at the ninth annual Shaping Justice conference. Aimed at inspiring students and lawyers to promote justice through public service, the conference will also feature an awards ceremony to honor alumni working in public interest roles. John Whitfield ’81, executive director and general counsel of Blue Ridge Legal Services, will receive the Shaping Justice Award for Extraordinary Achievement. Christine Dinan ’12, senior trial attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice’s Employment Litigation Section, and Sarah Buckley ’14, senior counsel for appellate matters at the DOJ’s Environment and Natural Resources Division, will receive the Shaping Justice Rising Star Award. This event is open to the Law School community only with advanced registration.

Public Service
Career
When
Friday, February 7, 2025, 11:30 a.m.-3:30 p.m.
Where
Caplin Pavilion and other locations
Contact
Laurel Owens
Sponsor
Program in Law and Public Service

Event Details

This event is open to the Law School community only with advanced registration.

11:30 a.m.-1 p.m.

Caplin Pavilion; doors open at 11:15 a.m. 

Lunch and Panel

Welcoming Remarks and Presentation of the 9th Annual Shaping Justice Alumni Awards

Plenary Panel | Death Comes for Chevron: What’s a Public Interest Lawyer To Do?

  • Kirti Datla, Director of Strategic Legal Advocacy, EarthJustice
  • Zoila Hinson, Partner, Relman Colfax
  • Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia, Samuel Weiss Faculty Scholar, Clinical Professor of Law; Director, Center for Immigrants’ Rights Clinic, Penn State Dickinson Law
  • Moderator: Cale Jaffe ’01, Professor of Law, Director, Program in Law, Communities and the Environment (PLACE), Director, Environmental Law and Community Engagement Clinic, University of Virginia School of Law

1:15-2:30 p.m.

Workshops

Session I | Public Defense in the Wake of Bruen

WB129

  • Alice Wang, Deputy Chief, Appellate Division, Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia

Session II | “Abortion On Our Own Terms”: Self-Managed Medication Abortion in Post-Dobbs Virginia

WB119

  • April Greene, Interim Executive Director, Blue Ridge Abortion Fund

2:45-3:30 p.m.

Caplin Pavilion

Keynote Address and Reception

  • Vincent Warren, Executive Director, Center for Constitutional Rights

About the Keynote Speaker

Vincent Warren

Vincent Warren, an expert on racial injustice and discriminatory policing, is the executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. He oversees the organization's litigation and advocacy work, using international and domestic law to challenge human rights abuses, including racial, gender and LGBTQIA injustice.

Under his leadership, the Center for Constitutional Rights successfully challenged the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy and profiling of Muslims, ended long-term solitary confinement in California’s Pelican Bay Prison, and established the persecution of LGBTQIA people as a crime against humanity.

The Center for Constitutional Rights is currently challenging the abuse of migrants at the U.S. Southern border, the Muslim ban, the torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib and the criminalization of transgender people, as well as providing legal and policy support to Black, brown and Native organizers across the country.

Warren is a graduate of Haverford College and Rutgers School of Law and currently holds the W. Haywood Burns Chair in Human and Civil Rights at CUNY Law School.


Award Recipients 

Sarah Buckley ’16

Sarah Buckley ’14

Sarah Buckley is a senior counsel for appellate matters in the Environmental Defense Section of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Environment and Natural Resources Division. She joined the department as an Honors Program attorney in 2016 following clerkships with Judge T.S. Ellis of the Eastern District of Virginia and Judge Judith W. Rogers of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. 

Beginning as a trial attorney, Buckley handled cases defending the United States and its agencies in federal District Court in suits under the federal Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, and Comprehensive Environmental Recovery, Compensation, and Liability Act. These included affirmative cases enforcing Section 404 of the Clean Water Act against unlawful discharges of fill material into U.S. waters, defense of Environmental Protection Agency water standards and defense of the EPA’s administration of its Total Maximum Daily Load program.

Buckley’s practice has also included defending EPA actions in circuit courts of appeals. She has argued cases in the Second, Ninth and D.C. Circuit dealing with complex rulemakings under the Clean Air Act, Toxic Substances Control Act, Safe Drinking Water Act and more. In her current role, she continues to practice in circuit court and also supervises other petitions for review, helping manage case teams and providing strategic advice and writing and oral advocacy feedback. 

Buckley graduated from UVA’s College of Arts and Sciences with majors in environmental thought and practice, and political philosophy, policy and law. After spending two years as a legislative aide to Del. David J. Toscano in the Virginia House of Delegates, she attended UVA Law School, where she was a fellow in the Program in Law and Public Service, served on the Board of the Public Interest Law Association and was editor-in-chief of the Virginia Law Review during its centennial year. 

Christine Dinan ’12

Christine Dinan

Christine Dinan is currently a senior trial attorney in the Employment Litigation Section of the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice. In this role, she investigates and litigates claims of employment discrimination against state and local government employers under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the recently enacted Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, and also enforces the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act against both public and private employers. At DOJ, Dinan has challenged gender pay discrimination and discriminatory parental leave policies, achieving successful resolutions resulting in significant monetary damages and policy changes. In 2024, she received a Special Commendation in recognition of her outstanding service to the Civil Rights Division.

Dinan began her legal career as an Equal Justice Works Fellow at the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, where she advocated for low-income pregnant workers and parents in the workplace through outreach, training and enforcement. While there, Dinan served on the trial team in Garcia v. Chipotle, which secured a $500,000 jury verdict on behalf of their client, a Chipotle line worker who was fired for leaving her shift to attend a prenatal appointment, in 2016. She was also a finalist, along with her colleagues, for Public Justice’s Trial Lawyer of the Year Award in 2018 for their work on Cote v. Wal-Mart, a case challenging the denial of health insurance benefits to employees’ same-sex spouses.

Prior to joining DOJ, Dinan worked as a senior staff attorney at A Better Balance. At ABB, she brought litigation challenging the denial of pregnancy-related accommodations and the assessment of penalties for lawful absences (including for prenatal care) under “no-fault” attendance policies, contributed to amicus briefs, and worked on legislation to increase protections for low-income workers and caregivers.

Dinan graduated from the School of Industrial & Labor Relations at Cornell University in 2007. After graduating from UVA Law in 2012, she clerked for two years at the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. 

John Whitfield

John E. Whitfield ’81

John E. Whitfield has worked at Blue Ridge Legal Services, the legal aid society that serves the Shenandoah Valley, since he was a second-year law student at UVA. After seeing a news article in the local paper announcing that a legal aid society was opening its doors in Harrisonburg, Virginia, near his home in Staunton, he wrote them about the possibility of securing a summer job there. They agreed to interview him and ultimately told him he was welcome to work there for the summer if he could find his own funding. He obtained off-campus work study funding from the UVA financial aid office and went to work at BRLS as a summer law clerk in May of 1980 — and never left.

The experience confirmed his interest in legal aid. Whitfield said he both loved his clients — folks from his hometown and people he grew up with — and the lawyers he was working with. Most of all, he loved using the law to bring justice to people who otherwise would never have had a chance of obtaining it without a legal aid lawyer.

After graduating in 1981 and being admitted to practice in Virginia, Whitfield was awarded a Reginal Heber Smith Community Lawyer (“Reggie”) Fellowship and was placed at BRLS, where he engaged in prisoners’ rights work for the next two years. When the fellowship ended, he was hired by BRLS as a staff attorney, serving his hometown of Staunton and the surrounding area as the one and only legal aid attorney there.

Over the 1980s, Whitfield honed his skills as a legal aid attorney, forcing reforms in local landlord-tenant practices, challenging illegal debt collection practices, enforcing the rights of hospital patients to free care and litigating scores of cases against predatory lending schemes of the time. In 1987, he was promoted to supervising attorney of the Harrisonburg office of BRLS, and in 1988 he served as acting executive director, becoming executive director in 1989.

Whitfield has become a leader in the Virginia legal aid community and in the access to justice movement. He has trained, guided and mentored countless legal aid lawyers, and spoken at the White House about his legal aid work. In 2014, then-Virginia Supreme Court Chief Justice Cynthia Kinser ’77 appointed him co-chair of the newly created Virginia Access to Justice Commission, alongside now-Chief Justice S. Bernard Goodwyn ’86. Whitfield continues to serve in this capacity today, where he works systemically to bring meaningful access to civil justice to the poor across Virginia. 


Other Participants

Kirti Datla is Earthjustice’s director of strategic legal advocacy and leads the organization’s efforts to anticipate and shape trends in judicial doctrine outside the environmental arena. This includes legal doctrines affecting justiciability, jurisdiction, the scope of federal power and judicial review of agency actions. Prior to joining Earthjustice, Datla worked in the Supreme Court and appellate practice group at Hogan Lovells, where she briefed and argued appeals before federal circuit courts and substantive motions before federal District Courts. She also briefed cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.


April Greene has worked as interim executive director of the Blue Ridge Abortion Fund since September. She previously worked as director of programs and strategies, providing strategic guidance and direction of BRAF’s core programmatic work and was responsible for the design, implementation and management of these programs: abortion funding, practical support, caller engagement, clinic engagement and volunteer programs. Greene has also worked as executive director of the Samaritan Center for Counseling and Wellness, and co-founder and board director of the Magnolia Fund: Southerners for Reproductive Equity, both in Athens, Georgia.


Zoila Hinson is a partner at Relman Colfax, which she joined in 2021. In her civil rights litigation practice, she works on a variety of cases involving housing discrimination, fair lending, redlining and the False Claims Act. Hinson has played a key role in numerous civil rights cases, including achieving a settlement on behalf of members of the Black, Gullah Geechee community on Sapelo Island, Georgia, in Drayton et al. v. McIntosh County. In 2024, she was part of a team that achieved one of the largest private redlining settlements to date.


Cale Jaffe ’01 is director of the Environmental Law and Community Engagement Clinic. Through his work with the clinic, Jaffe has represented a diverse array of public-interest clients, from a community group working to preserve an early 20th-century Black schoolhouse in Cumberland County, Virginia, to local governments filing amicus briefs in the Supreme Court of the United States. He also serves as director of PLACE, the Program in Law, Communities and the Environment, along with Richard C. Schragger.


Leslie Kendrick ’06 is the 13th dean of the Law School. She is an expert on torts and freedom of speech whose work has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Law & Philosophy, Legal Theory, and Philosophy & Public Affairs, among other journals. She is co-author of the casebook Tort Law: Responsibilities and Redress, with John C. P. Goldberg, Anthony J. Sebok and Benjamin C. Zipursky. Kendrick is a recipient of the University of Virginia’s All-University Teaching Award and the Law School’s Carl McFarland Prize for outstanding research by a junior faculty member. Kendrick is a member of the American Law Institute and an adviser to the Restatement of the Law Third, Torts: Defamation and Privacy. She is past chair of the AALS Section on Torts and Compensation Systems.


Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia is an immigration scholar, law professor, author and attorney. Wadhia joined Penn State Law as a Clinical Professor of Law in 2008 and was named Samuel Weiss Faculty Scholar in 2013. In 2023, Wadhia was appointed by President Joe Biden as the Officer for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. She led an office of more than 150 people focusing on culture and mission excellence, while leading efforts on civil rights and civil liberties, advances in artificial intelligence, language access, human rights, racial equity and combating gender-based violence, among other efforts. Wadhia received the DHS Outstanding Service Medal from the Secretary in 2024 at the end of her tenure. Her scholarship has focused on the role of prosecutorial discretion in immigration law and policy; and the intersection of immigration, race and national security. Her work has been widely cited by federal judges and scholars.


Alice Wang is a deputy chief of the Appellate Division at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, where she has worked as an appellate attorney since 2005. Wang has litigated more than 100 criminal appeals and postconviction matters in the District of Columbia, including several en banc cases in the District of Columbia Court of Appeals. In addition to briefing and arguing criminal appeals on behalf of indigent clients and as amicus curiae, she regularly conducts training for the local criminal defense bar and the Superior Court of the District of Columbia.