CSER Seminar Room (Hamilton 420)
Join the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race for a panel discussion featuring lawyers, legal scholars, and a law school student working toward social and racial justice. The conversation will be geared for students interested in law, and will address practical questions about funding law school as a low-income student as well as conceptual questions about the intersections between Ethnicity and Race Studies and the law.
Wednesday, February 12th, 2025 @ 6:30-8PM
420 Hamilton
Dinner will be served!
RSVP here: https://forms.gle/4JRmpF6vx2sQQE997
Panelist Bios:
A civil rights attorney for nearly four decades, Elizabeth OuYang’s areas of expertise include voting, immigration, race, sex, and disability discrimination at the workplace, media accountability, and combating hate crimes and police brutality. President Clinton appointed OuYang to serve as special assistant to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. OuYang has taught over 1500 students at Columbia and New York University combined in the past 25 years, of which approximately 100 students have matriculated to law school within the past 11 years alone. As a consultant to The New York Community Trust, OuYang coordinated a funding collaborative to support organizations helping immigrants integrate into New York City. OuYang served as the coordinator for APA VOICE Redistricting Task Force for the 2020 redistricting cycle. For the past 18 years, OuYang has supervised OCA-NY’s Hate Crimes Prevention Art Project which has expanded to become a juvenile diversion program.
Mavis Fowler-Williams is a leader of intellectual property and technology law and lecturer in law at Columbia Law School. She negotiates agreements and prepares training materials for private clients in the finance and entertainment industries. Fowler-Williams started her own law firm, Intellectual Property and Technology Law in the 21st Century, specializing in negotiating a full array of intellectual property agreements for entertainment companies. In addition to prosecuting patent applications for inventors, she was actively involved in the patent licensing of a film editing process for one of her corporate clients, as well as managing the trademark portfolios of companies in the clothing, dance, and travel media industries. Fowler-Williams received her J.D. from Columbia Law School and her B.S. from Columbia University.
Amber Baylor is the founding director of the Criminal Defense Clinic, which focuses on defense representation in local criminal charges, and lecturer in law at Columbia Law School. Her work centers on local criminal regulation and its impacts on communities targeted by intensive policing. Her scholarship continues on this theme, including “Unexceptional Protest,” “Criminalized Students, Reparations, and the Limits of Prospective Reform,” and “Design Justice in Municipal Criminal Regulation.” Baylor also has written about historic advocacy by women in prison, women and pretrial detention, and the impact of trauma from pretrial detention. Before joining the Law School in 2021, Baylor was the founder and director of the Criminal Defense Clinic at Texas A&M School of Law. Baylor is a former fellow of The International Legal Foundation, where she worked with public defenders in Palestine.
Jack Ruiz is a 3L at Columbia Law School. At CLS, he is involved with the Frederick Douglass Moot Court and the Native American Law Students Association. Prior to law school, Jack worked at Accenture, where he led the company’s pro-bono efforts. In 2019, Jack graduated from Columbia College, where he majored in Political Science and concentrated in Ethnic Studies. During his undergraduate, Jack helped co-found Alianza and participated in undocumented student organizing. He is a first-generation college and law school student.
