Three alumni of the University of Virginia School of Law will be honored at the ninth annual Shaping Justice conference.

John Whitfield ’81, who has worked with Blue Ridge Legal Services since 1980 and as the organization’s executive director and general counsel since 1989, will receive the Shaping Justice Award for Extraordinary Achievement.

Christine Dinan ’12 and Sarah Buckley ’14 will each be recognized with the Shaping Justice Rising Star Award.

Dinan has served as a senior trial attorney with the Department of Justice’s Employment Litigation Section since 2021. Buckley has worked with the Environment and Natural Resources Division at DOJ for more than eight years and is currently senior counsel for appellate matters with the division.

The awards will be presented at the Feb. 7 Shaping Justice event at Caplin Pavilion. The conference will include a panel discussion, workshops and a keynote address from Vincent Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

The event is sponsored by UVA Law’s Program in Law and Public Service and aims to inspire lawyers and law students to promote justice through public interest work.

John Whitfield ’81

John Whitfield

Whitfield learned early in life about the difficulty of obtaining legal representation with limited financial resources.

As a teenager growing up in Staunton, Virginia, his mother needed a lawyer but couldn’t afford one on her limited income as a housecleaner. Luckily, she visited the office of a young attorney named Rudolph Bumgardner III, who agreed to represent her on a pro bono basis.

For several years, Whitfield recounted, Bumgardner, who would later serve as a Virginia appellate judge, represented her without ever charging a fee. It was an example, Whitfield said, that “has been an inspiration for me throughout my life.”

Whitfield graduated from UVA in 1977 with a degree in international relations. He enrolled in the Law School a year later. While in his second year, Whitfield learned about a new legal aid society opening in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and inquired about a job. He was hired as a summer clerk and has been at Blue Ridge Legal Services ever since.

“It was love at first sight,” he said. He was able to help people he grew up with while working alongside “idealistic, smart young lawyers working for a pittance but with a passion and zeal for changing the law.”

Whitfield would serve as a legal fellow with the organization, a staff attorney beginning in 1983 and then a supervising attorney starting in 1987.

By the late 1980s, the group had cycled through several executive directors and was facing another vacancy. Recognizing the need for leadership stability, Whitfield applied for the role and became executive director in 1989, a position he continues to hold.

Under Whitfield’s leadership, Blue Ridge Legal Services has closed nearly 100,000 cases for low-income residents in the Shenandoah and Roanoke valleys.

“I’ve managed to keep the lights on for the past 35 years so that we could help all these folks, who would have had nowhere else to turn if we weren’t there,” he said.

Among his many achievements on behalf of local residents were convincing the school district in Harrisonburg to drop textbook fees — a decision that helped thousands of low-income students — and stopping a local hospital from continuing debt collection practices that targeted low-income patients who were eligible for free care.

One of his favorite stories was from a case early in his career. A young woman was behind in her rent and sought Whitfield’s help after a landlord obtained a warrant that allowed the sheriff’s office to padlock her residence, preventing entry, prior to any court hearing

Whitfield successfully challenged the practice, and from that point forward padlocks were no longer used against low-income tenants in that jurisdiction.

The only unique aspect of the matter, he said in 1998 remarks accepting the Virginia State Bar’s Legal Aid Award, “was that it was simply the first time a tenant in that situation had access to a lawyer to challenge that despicable practice, a practice that had been allowed to develop and grow into an established routine because the poor had no representation, since time immemorial.”

Whitfield’s contributions to his field extend well beyond his own legal work, according to attorney Grant D. Penrod ’03 in a letter nominating him for the Shaping Justice Extraordinary Achievement Award.

“He has served as a mentor to countless attorneys, including myself and two of my law partners. He has been a compassionate, humble and exceptionally effective advocate for low-income Virginians for more than four decades (with no signs of showing that he will not continue to five),” Penrod wrote.

Whitfield has also championed legal aid through service on numerous statewide committees, including as co-chair of the Virginia Access to Justice Commission where he has served alongside Chief Justice S. Bernard Goodwyn ’86 of the Supreme Court of Virginia and now with Justice Stephen McCullough. He has authored many articles on the justice gap for low-income individuals, won numerous awards and has even spoken at the White House about his work.

“He has been a tireless, effective and respected advocate for legal aid throughout Virginia,” Penrod wrote.

Whitfield said his proudest legacy as a lawyer is that his commitment to public service has also been embraced by his son, Matthew, who is an attorney with the Central Virginia Legal Aid Society in Richmond.

For any current or aspiring lawyer, Whitfield’s story is a testament to the joy that can come from finding and following your calling.

"I can think of nothing more fulfilling than using one’s skills as a lawyer to bring justice to those who otherwise would never have a chance of attaining it. It has been a privilege, a veritable dream come true, to serve as a legal aid attorney my entire legal career," he said.

Christine Dinan ’12

Christine Dinan

While she knew she wanted to be lawyer from a young age, Dinan said her interest in employment law was sparked while an undergraduate at Cornell University, where she majored in industrial and labor relations and graduated in 2007.

“Spending four years learning all about the labor movement and the workplace — it really drove home that so much of our identities and sense of purpose is shaped by our lives at work,” she said. A class on women and economics highlighted how women faced additional barriers in the labor market that needed to be addressed.

“I developed an early passion for using the law to advocate for women and those with caregiving responsibilities,” she said.

After two clerkships with the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, Dinan spent nearly four years with the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, where she advocated on behalf of low-income pregnant workers and parents in the workplace.

She was a key part of a significant courtroom victory in 2016, serving on the trial team in Garcia v. Chipotle that represented a Chipotle worker who was fired for leaving her shift for a prenatal appointment. Dinan helped win a $500,000 jury verdict on behalf of her client.

“To be able to tell her story and to hold a large corporation to account for what she had experienced and get her a significant victory really made an impact,” Dinan said.

In 2018, she joined A Better Balance, a nonprofit legal advocacy group committed to work-family justice issues. There, she continued her advocacy on behalf of pregnant women and mothers in the workforce, including bringing litigation that challenged penalties for lawful absences such as prenatal care and policies that denied pregnancy-related accommodations.

In 2021, she joined the DOJ, eager for new opportunities to continue her fight for justice in the workplace.

“Being able to bring a case of employment discrimination on behalf of an individual who’s been harmed or a class of folks who’ve experience discriminatory treatment, and to do so on behalf of the United States, is powerful,” Dinan said.

In a letter nominating her for the award, Katie Delsandro ’12, director of admissions at UVA Law, praised Dinan for her work on behalf of clients and in support of policies aimed at establishing more equitable workplaces for mothers.

“Christine’s dedicated commitment to the rights of employees, particularly women, is inspiring,” Delsandro wrote.

She also cited Dinan’s willingness to serve as a mentor to UVA Law students and young alumni: “Her advice and approachable demeanor make her an essential asset to the UVA Law community — both within the Law School and beyond.”

While at UVA Law, Dinan was active in the Public Interest Law Association and served on the editorial board of the Virginia Journal of Social Policy and the Law.

“UVA shaped me into the lawyer that I am. They gave me the tools to do the work that I do,” she said.

As Dinan looks ahead in her legal career, it is clear she has found her mission.

“I really love what I do. I want to keep doing what I’m doing, advocating for workers, for employment justice, particularly on behalf of people who don’t always have access to the justice system,” she said.

Sarah Buckley ’14

Sarah Buckley

Buckley’s path toward environmental law was forged at an early age. With part of her childhood spent in Hawaii, she recalled idyllic times spent sailing, swimming and hiking.

“I remember the relationship between people and our environment, and the delicacy of that relationship was very apparent,” Buckley said, adding that it was during this time she first started thinking about issues like the need to protect water resources.

A Double Hoo, Buckley said that as an undergraduate at UVA she took a course with Professor Vivian Thomson, who has since retired, on the intersection of science and politics and how that affects environmental policy. That class, she said, “really set me on my current path.”

She would go on to graduate with a bachelor’s degree in environmental thought and practice, and political philosophy, policy and law in 2009.

While at UVA Law, Buckley was editor-in-chief of the Virginia Law Review during the publication’s centennial year. She also served on the board of the Public Interest Law Association.

After graduating, Buckley completed two federal clerkships, at the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia with Judge T.S. Ellis III and at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit with Judge Judith W. Rogers. It was experience, she said, that would prove valuable in the years ahead.

“It allowed me to see all stages of litigation in a really short of amount of time that you couldn’t get on the other side of the bench,” she said, adding that her clerkships also gave her extensive practice in sharpening her writing skills.

“Being a great writer is just absolutely central to being a great litigator,” Buckley said.

In 2016, she joined the Environmental Defense Section of the DOJ’s Environment and Natural Resources Division. As a trial attorney, she has represented the U.S. government in federal district courts in cases relating to the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act and the Comprehensive Environmental Recovery, Compensation and Liability Act.

Buckley would win the Assistant Attorney General’s Award for Distinguished New Employee in 2018.

“She quickly established herself as one of the division’s elite advocates,” wrote Amanda Lineberry ’19, a trial attorney with the division, in a letter nominating Buckley.

Among her many experiences as a DOJ advocate, she cited one memorable oral argument she delivered via Zoom during the pandemic in a case involving how the Environmental Protection Agency regulates stationary air pollutant sources in various scenarios.

It was a particularly complicated case, Buckley said, with both complex statutory and scientific elements. Although she did not write the brief for the case, Buckley was able to engage with the judges for more than an hour.

“I appreciate the judges’ questions, and the judges clearly appreciated that I was able to come to it with an understanding of how they were going to think about the structure of the argument, of how they were going to think about the issues and had answers to give them,” she said.

In 2022, Buckley was elevated to senior attorney in the Environmental and Natural Resources Division. Last year, she was promoted again to senior counsel for appellate matters, with her portfolio expanding to include assisting in the management of case teams, providing strategic advice and supervising petitions for review.

As her role evolved at the DOJ, Lineberry wrote that one thing that did not change was Buckley’s ability to excel.

“Sarah has consistently distinguished herself through her determination in pursuing justice, her unwavering commitment to good government, and her exceptional written and oral advocacy," wrote Lineberry, who also praised Buckley as an “exceptional mentor” to new DOJ attorneys and interns.

Reflecting on the Shaping Justice award and what it represented, Buckley said she hoped the honor she received would shine a spotlight on the vast opportunities available through public service.

“I think that it can be hard as a law student to see what your public service path is. And so, I really hope that the Law School’s recognition can help others who are interested in that path, to show them that there are great things to be done,” she said.

Founded in 1819, the University of Virginia School of Law is the second-oldest continuously operating law school in the nation. Consistently ranked among the top law schools, Virginia is a world-renowned training ground for distinguished lawyers and public servants, instilling in them a commitment to leadership, integrity and community service.

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