ACS Bay Area: Accountability for Lawyers in the Post-Trump Era

Join the ACS Bay Area, Austin, Chicago, DC, Georgia, Los Angeles, and Puget Sound Lawyer Chapters for a discussion about whether current legal ethical rules and culture (which privilege client advocacy) are adequate to address the norm-busting of the Trump era. We will also answer what role lawyers should have in asking broader questions about the moral failings of contemporary legal regimes including that of policing, whether attorneys should suffer professional consequences for representing reprehensible causes, and what groups like the NAACP-LDF, the People's Parity Project, and Protect Democracy are doing to create a greater culture of accountability.

Featuring:

Amber Koonce, LDF/Fried Frank Fellow, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.

Miranda Mammen, Member, People's Parity Project

Erica Newland, Counsel, Protect Democracy

Moderated by:

Catherine Fisk, Barbara Nachtrieb Armstrong Professor of Law, UC Berkeley School of Law

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Speaker Bios:

Amber Koonce is a Fried Frank Civil Rights Fellow at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Amber previously clerked for the Hon. William A. Fletcher on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and worked as a Luce Scholar for the Humanitarian Legal Assistance Foundation in the Philippines. Her current work includes challenging the Trump Administration’s executive order banning certain diversity and inclusion trainings, representing a class of incarcerated individuals challenging the conditions of their confinement during the COVID-19 pandemic, and representing an individual challenging a sentence of juvenile life without parole. Prior to law school, Amber worked with children incarcerated in North Carolina, Ghana, Scotland, and the Philippines. Amber received her J.D. from Yale Law School and her B.A. in Public Policy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Miranda Mammen is an organizing member of the People's Parity Project Trump Accountability Team. She is also a worker's rights lawyer with the National Domestic Workers Alliance. In law school, she was a student attorney and Vice President for Practice Standards of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, a student-run clinic and the second-largest provider of civil legal services in the greater Boston area. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, in 2019, and with distinction from Stanford University, in 2014.

Erica Newland is Counsel at Protect Democracy. From 2016-2018, Erica served as an Attorney Adviser at the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice (DoJ). She has written and spoken publicly about the challenges of serving as a career attorney at DoJ during the Trump Administration. Before joining DoJ, Erica served as a law clerk to the Honorable Merrick B. Garland of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and as a Senior Policy Analyst at the Center for Democracy & Technology. During law school, Erica worked for the National Security Division at DoJ and the Senate Judiciary Committee. Erica received her J.D. from Yale Law School.

Catherine L. Fisk is the Barbara Nachtrieb Armstrong Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches courses on labor and employment law, civil procedure, and the legal profession. Professor Fisk is the author of two monographs: Working Knowledge: Employee Innovation and the Rise of Corporate Intellectual Property, 1800-1930 (University of North Carolina Press, 2009), which won prizes from the American Society for Legal History and the American Historical Association; and Writing for Hire: Unions, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue (Harvard University Press, 2016). She is the co-author of two law school casebooks, Labor Law in the Contemporary Workplace, and The Legal Profession: Ethics in Contemporary Practice, and two other edited volumes, and has published over 100 articles, essays, and chapters in major law reviews, peer-edited journals, and edited volumes. Her next book will examine mid-twentieth century labor union lawyers. Her current public service and pro bono legal work includes filing amicus briefs on various labor and employment law issues, service on several nonprofit organizations’ board of directors, and occasional service as an arbitrator under collectively bargained labor contracts. She received an AB summa cum laude from Princeton University and a JD from the University of California, Berkeley.