Alice Abrokwa
Alice Abrokwa, a former federal attorney and civil rights litigator, is an expert in disability law, health law and antidiscrimination law. Prior to joining the Law School, Abrokwa served as a 2023-24 annual fellow with the Harvard Law School Project on Disability and a senior counsel in the Office for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education. She previously served as a senior attorney at the National Center for Youth Law, where she engaged in impact litigation on behalf of children and youth across the country focused on the areas of special education and children's mental health. Prior to that position, Abrokwa was a trial attorney with the Disability Rights Section of the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division and a Skadden Fellow at the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, where she primarily represented D.C. students with mental health disabilities in special education matters.
Andrew Block
Andrew Block previously served as director of the Virginia Department of Juvenile Justice from 2014 to 2019. As director, Block led major reforms and improvements in the department, including safely reducing the population of youth in state-operated juvenile correction centers, reforming rehabilitative programming, and replacing juvenile correction centers with a continuum of community and evidence-based programs and alternative placements. Before leading the department, Block directed the Child Advocacy Clinic at the Law School from 2010-14, and previously founded and served as the legal director of the JustChildren program of the Legal Aid Justice Center.
Naomi R. Cahn
Naomi Cahn is an expert in family law, trusts and estates, feminist jurisprudence, reproductive technology, and aging and the law. Prior to joining the University of Virginia faculty in 2020, she taught at George Washington Law School, where she twice served as associate dean. She is the co-director of UVA Law’s Family Law Center. Cahn is a co-author of casebooks in both family law and trusts and estates, and she has written numerous articles exploring the intersections among family law, trusts and estates, and feminist theory, as well as essays concerning the connections between gender and international law. In addition, she is the author or editor of books written for both academic and trade publishers. Her books include “Red Families v. Blue Families” (Oxford University Press, 2010, with Professor June Carbone): “Homeward Bound” (Oxford University Press, 2017, with Amy Ziettlow); and “Unequal Family Lives” (Cambridge University Press, 2018, co-edited with UVA professor Brad Wilcox and others).
Cale Jaffe
Chinh Q. Le
Chinh Le ’00 is director of the Law School’s Center for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. From 2011 to 2021, he served as legal director of the Legal Aid Society of the District of Columbia, the oldest and largest general civil legal services program in the nation’s capital. In that capacity, he was responsible for the organization’s legal program — including Legal Aid’s individual client representation, systemic appellate and policy advocacy, and impact litigation across all of its practice areas — and oversaw a staff of roughly 60 lawyers and more than a dozen legal assistants. Prior to joining Legal Aid, Le was director of the division on civil rights in the office of the New Jersey Attorney General, where he led the state’s enforcement of state and federal civil rights and family leave laws. From 2001-06, he served as assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc., in New York, the first two years as a Skadden Fellow.
Molly McShane
Now a lecturer, Molly McShane previously served as director of public service, counseling students on a variety of career paths in the public sector, including civil legal services, prosecution, indigent defense, and federal and state and local government. Prior to her work in the Public Service Center, McShane spent two years as a lecturer-in-law supervising students in the Child Advocacy Clinic at the Law School. She is also the former director of the Child Advocacy Pro Bono Project, which provides representation for children in the juvenile justice system and children with disabilities in the public school system.
Kimberly Jenkins Robinson
Kimberly Jenkins Robinson is a professor at the School of Law as well as a professor at the School of Education and Human Development, and the Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. She is one of the nation’s leading education law experts and speaks throughout the United States about K-20 educational equity, school funding, education and democracy, equal opportunity, civil rights, Title IX and federalism. She also serves as director of the Law School’s Center for the Study of Race and Law.
Robinson is the editor of A Federal Right to Education: Fundamental Questions for Our Democracy (New York University Press, 2019). In the book, Robinson brings together some of the nation’s leading law and education scholars to examine why the United States should consider recognizing a federal right to education, how the United States could recognize such a right and what the right should guarantee. She is also the editor, with Professor Charles Ogletree Jr. of Harvard Law School, of The Enduring Legacy of Rodriguez: Creating New Pathways to Equal Educational Opportunity (Harvard Education Press, 2015). In it, scholars analyze the impact of the 1972 U.S. Supreme Court decision San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, which held that the U.S. Constitution does not protect a right to education. Scholars also propose innovative federal, state and local reforms for remedying the harms of Rodriguez.
Before Robinson began her career as a professor, she practiced law in the General Counsel’s Office of the U.S. Department of Education and as an education litigation attorney with Hogan & Hartson law firm in Washington, D.C. (now Hogan Lovells). Robinson is a member of the American Law Institute, a senior research fellow of the Learning Policy Institute and a faculty senior fellow with UVA’s Miller Center. She is a past chair of the Education Law Section of the Association of American Law Schools.
James E. Ryan
James E. Ryan ’92 is a professor of law and served as the ninth president of the University of Virginia from 2018 to 2025. A leading expert on law and education, Ryan has written extensively about the ways in which law structures educational opportunity. His articles and essays address such topics as school desegregation, school finance, school choice, standards and testing, pre-K, and the intersection of special education and neuroscience. Ryan is also the co-author of the textbook “Educational Policy and the Law” and the author of “Five Miles Away, A World Apart,” which was published in 2010 by Oxford University Press. In addition, Ryan has authored articles on constitutional law and theory and has argued before the United States Supreme Court.
Before coming to UVA as president, Ryan served as dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. In this role, Ryan increased the size, strength, and diversity of the faculty through new hires and promotions. He established the Harvard Teacher Fellows program, an innovative teacher training program for Harvard College seniors and recent alumni, and began a school-wide effort to reimagine its master’s degree programs. Before his deanship, Ryan was the Matheson & Morgenthau Distinguished Professor at the University of Virginia School of Law. He also served as academic associate dean from 2005 to 2009 and founded and directed the school’s Program in Law and Public Service. While at Virginia, Ryan received an All-University Teaching Award, an Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, and several awards for his scholarship. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Karoline Homer Ryan
Katie Ryan ’92 co-teaches the State and Local Government Policy Clinic. Previously, she had served as staff attorney for the Education Law Clinic at Harvard Law School as well as a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in its Child Advocacy Program. Her areas of focus include special education, school discipline and the impact of trauma on children in schools. From 2008-13, Ryan was the director of the Child Advocacy Pro Bono Project at the Law School, which, in partnership with the Legal Aid Justice Center and area private attorneys, provides representation for children in the juvenile justice system and children with disabilities in public school. Ryan also supervised students in the Law School’s Child Advocacy Clinic. Early in her career, she received an Echoing Green fellowship to develop a child advocacy project in San Diego, worked on education reform issues at the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation in New York, and served as deputy counsel for a subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives in Washington, D.C.
Richard C. Schragger
Richard C. Schragger’s scholarship focuses on the intersection of constitutional law and local government law, federalism, urban policy, and the constitutional and economic status of cities. He also writes about law and religion. He has authored articles on the Establishment and Free Exercise clauses, the role of cities in a federal system, local recognition of same-sex marriage, takings law and economic development, and the history of the anti-chain store movement. Schragger is a faculty fellow at the Miller Center, a faculty adviser to the Local Solutions Support Center, and a member of the American Law Institute. He is the author of City Power: Urban Governance in a Global Age (Oxford University Press, 2016).
Crystal Shin
Crystal Shin ’10 is director of the Holistic Youth Defense Clinic, and teaches courses on juvenile justice and public service lawyering. Shin was previously a clinical assistant professor at William & Mary Law School, where she directed the PELE Special Education Advocacy Clinic. Under her supervision, law students provide free legal representation to children with disabilities and their families. Before joining William & Mary, Shin was an attorney with the JustChildren Program of the Legal Aid Justice Center, where she provided legal representation to children and families in the areas of special education, school discipline, juvenile justice and immigration. During that time, she supervised law students in the Child Advocacy Clinic at the University of Virginia School of Law. Prior to law school, Shin taught fourth grade for three years in Henderson, North Carolina, through the Teach For America program.
Xiao Wang
Xiao Wang, director of the Supreme Court Litigation Clinic, has led appeals and argued cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, the federal courts of appeals, and other federal courts and agencies. Wang writes about federal courts, constitutional law, and law and religion. Wang has had been a passionate supporter of early childhood education. In college, when earning his B.A. in economics at the University of Virginia, he was a program director for the Charlottesville Head Start chapter. He also earned a master’s in public policy from UVA and worked as a consultant at McKinsey & Co. While earning his J.D. from Yale Law School, he taught high school students for the Marshall-Brennan Constitutional Literacy Project. He volunteered at Washington, D.C., and Chicago schools while in private practice. In his clinical work, he led a legal challenge to juvenile shackling practices in Texas; the state limited these practices in 2023.
