Inaugural Workshop for Asian American Women in the Legal Academy

Rose Cuison-Villazor

Rose Cuison-Villazor has been serving as Interim Dean of Rutgers Law School in Newark since July 1, 2021, and previously served as Vice-Dean. She is also Professor of Law, Chancellor's Social Justice Scholar, and the founding Director of the Center for Immigration Law, Policy and Justice at Rutgers Law School.

Cuison-Villazor teaches, researches, and writes in the areas of immigration and citizenship law, property law, Asian Americans and the law, equal protection law, and critical race theory. Her research agenda explores the meaning of citizenship and ways that legal structures and systems determine membership and a sense of belonging in the United States. She teaches Property Law, Immigration Law, Critical Race Theory, Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders and the Law, Estates in Land, and Introduction to U.S. Law.

Meera E. Deo

Meera E. Deo is a Professor of Law at Southwestern Law School. Deo is a national expert on legal education, racial representation, and diversity, equity, and inclusion. She is also Director of the Law School Survey of Student Engagement (LSSSE), which houses the largest repository of law student data and is based at Indiana University-Bloomington. Before joining Southwestern, she was a tenured Professor of Law at Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego. Deo has also held previous visiting positions at Berkeley Law, UC Irvine School of Law, UCLA School of Law, UC Davis School of Law, and New College of Florida. She teaches Civil Procedure, Evidence, Law & Society, and Race & Law. Her research utilizes empirical methods to interrogate institutional diversity, affirmative action, and Critical Race Theory. Deo's scholarship has been widely published in law reviews and peer-review journals and cited in numerous amicus briefs filed in the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2020, she was elected to the American Law Institute.

Margaret Hu

Margaret Hu is a Professor of Law and of International Affairs, Co-Hire for the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences, and Faculty Member of the Institute for Network and Security Research in the College of Engineering at The Pennsylvania State University. She also serves as Penn State Law's inaugural Dean for Non-JD Programs. Her research interests include the intersection of immigration policy, national security, cybersurveillance, and civil rights. She has published several works on dataveillance and cybersurveillance, including, Biometric ID Cybersurveillance; Big Data Blacklisting; Taxonomy of the Snowden Disclosures; Biometric Cyberintelligence and the Posse Comitatus Act; and Algorithmic Jim Crow. She is currently a member of the Advisory Board of the Future of Privacy Forum, a non-profit think tank in Washington, D.C., that promotes responsible data privacy policies. Previously, she served as special policy counsel in the Office of Special Counsel for Immigration-Related Unfair Employment Practices (OSC), Civil Rights Division, U.S. Department of Justice.

Nancy Kim

Nancy Kim is a ProFlowers Distinguished Professor of Internet Studies and Professor of Law at California Western School of Law. She is also a Visiting Professor at Rady School of Management at UC San Diego. Kim joined the faculty in fall 2004. She has also taught as a visiting faculty member at The Ohio State University, Moritz College of Law, Rady School of Management at the University of California, San Diego, and Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand.

Prior to joining the faculty at California Western, Kim was Vice President of Business and Legal Affairs of a multinational software and services company. She has worked in business and legal capacities for several Bay Area technology companies and was an associate in the corporate law departments at Heller, Ehrman, White & McAuliffe in San Francisco and Gunderson, Dettmer in Menlo Park.

Suzanne Kim

Suzanne A. Kim is Associate Dean of Academic Research Centers, Professor of Law, and Judge Denny Chin Scholar at Rutgers Law School. Her research and teaching focus on family, procedure, constitutional law, antidiscrimination, critical theory, and socio-legal studies. Her interdisciplinary scholarship examines relationships between law, critical theory, and social sciences in relation to the regulation of intimacies, gender, family, and discrimination.

Kim is a member of the Executive Committee of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Section on Law and the Humanities and member of the Executive Committee of the AALS Section on Family and Juvenile Law. She is a 2011 winner of the Association of American Law Schools Women in Legal Education New Voices in Gender Studies Paper Competition.

Cynthia Lee

Cynthia Lee is the Edward F. Howrey Professor of Law at the George Washington University Law School where she teaches Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, Adjudicatory Criminal Procedure, and Professional Responsibility. She received a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Stanford University and a JD from UC Berkeley Law School. Upon graduating from law school, she clerked for Judge Harold M. Fong, then Chief Judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of Hawaii. She then served as an associate with Cooper, White & Cooper in San Francisco, California, where she was a member of the firm's criminal defense practice group. Lee started teaching at the University of San Diego School of Law in 1993, where she received the Thorsness Prize for Excellence in Teaching. She joined the GW Law faculty in August 2001.

Sudha Setty

Sudha Setty became Dean of the Western New England School of Law in 2018 and has served on the faculty since 2006. Setty has taught courses in Constitutional Law, Law & Terrorism, National Security & Government Accountability, Contracts, and Business Organizations. She was a visiting scholar at the University of Cape Town Faculty of Law in 2018, a Fulbright Senior Specialist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law in 2014, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law in 2011. She was awarded Western New England Law School's Catherine J. Jones Professor of Year Award in 2009, 2016, and 2018, was recognized in 2015 as Trailblazer by the South Asian Bar Association of Connecticut, and received the 2017 Tapping Reeve Legal Educator Award from the Connecticut Bar Association. In July 2018, she was elected to membership in the American Law Institute.

Dean Setty's scholarly work focuses on comparative analysis of separation of powers, rule of law, and national security. Her monograph, National Security Secrecy: Comparative Effects on Democracy and the Rule of Law, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2017. She has written dozens of law review articles and book chapters on national security and the rule of law, as well as editing the 2014 book, Constitutions, Security, and the Rule of Law. She currently serves on the editorial board of the Journal of National Security Law and Policy and the executive committee of the American Society of Comparative Law.

Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia

Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia is Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; the Samuel Weiss Faculty Scholar; and Clinical Professor of Law at Penn State Law in University Park. Her research focuses on the role of prosecutorial discretion in immigration law and the intersections of race, national security, and immigration. She has published more than thirty law review articles, book chapters, and essays on immigration law. Her work has been published in Duke Law Journal, Emory Law Journal, Texas Law Review, Washington and Lee Law Review, Harvard Latino Law Review, Administrative Law Review, and Columbia Journal of Race and Law. Wadhia has published two books with New York University Press: Beyond Deportation: The Role of Prosecutorial Discretion in Immigration Cases (2015) and Banned: Immigration Enforcement in the Time of Trump (2019). Wadhia is the author of Immigration and Nationality Law: Problems and Solutions, with Steve Yale-Loehr and Lenni Benson, published by Carolina Academic Press in 2019.

Margaret Woo

Margaret Woo is a Professor of Law at Northeastern University School of Law. Professor Woo, a leading expert on the Anglo-American legal system and the Chinese socialist legal system, teaches Civil Procedure, Administrative Law, and Comparative Law. She is a former fellow of the Bunting Institute (Radcliffe College) and is presently an associate of the East Asian Legal Studies Program at Harvard University. She has received many prestigious grants from a variety of organizations, including the National Science Foundation and the Ford Foundation, and is on the Senior Scholar Roster for the Fulbright Scholars Program. In 2015, she served as an invited visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute in Luxembourg. In 2018, she was selected for a Fulbright Specialist award. Under the Fulbright auspices, she is partnering with faculty at the University of Florence in Italy to develop a series of comparative law seminars at the University of Florence that address the changing landscape of international cooperation over the past year, including BREXIT, multi-lateral treaties, and ongoing political developments in the US and Europe that, as a whole, suggest further withdrawals from international law institutions, comparative law projects and multi-lateral institutions may be imminent.

Ellen Wu

Ellen Wu is an Associate Professor of the Department of History, Director of Asian American Studies Program, and Affiliate Faculty of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society at Indiana University. The issues that animate her research grapple with problems of race, citizenship, and migration in US history. Wu's first book, The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority (Princeton, 2014), tells of the astonishing makeover of Asians in the United States from the “yellow peril” to “model minorities” in the middle decades of the twentieth century. It charts this transformation within the dual contexts of the United States’ global rise and the black freedom movement. The Color of Success reveals that this far-reaching, politically charged process continues to have profound implications for how Americans understand race, opportunity, and nationhood.