Focus: Law
Nikita Lalwani
Nikita Lalwani is a law clerk on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York. She previously served as a law clerk on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Â At Yale Law School, from which she graduated in 2020, she was the Yale Law Journal's Executive Editor for Articles & Essays and helped advocate for a fairer census as a team leader in the Peter Gruber Rule of Law Clinic. She was also the co-president of the Yale Law National Security Group, co-director of the Yale chapter of the International Refugee Assistance Project, and a Kerry Fellow at the Jackson…
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Brian Kagoro
Brian Kagoro is the Programme Support Division Director of the Africa Regional Office (AfRO) of the Open Society Foundations (OSF). Prior to that he was Founder and Executive Director of UHAI Africa Group, a governance and development consulting firm with operations in Johannesburg, Harare, and Nairobi. Brian is a Pan Africanist and a constitutional and economic relations lawyer. Prior to establishing UHAI Africa Group, Brian was the Regional Programme Advisor for the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) Africa Governance and Public Administration Program, where he also led the UNDP Africa Governance Team within the Regional Service Centre for Africa. Prior to joining the UNDP, Brian served as Pan African Head…
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Hauwa Ibrahim
Hauwa Ibrahim, J.D., S.J.D., M.L., is an internationally known human rights lawyer, currently serving as President of The Peace Institute, who was awarded the European Parliament Sakharov Prize for freedom of thoughts in 2005. She has defended over 150 cases involving women sentenced to death by stoning and children sentenced to amputation of limbs under Shariah law. Brought up in a small village in northern Nigeria, Hauwa was born into a culture that did not encourage schooling for girls beyond elementary school. Through sheer persistence and the gracious support of others, she attended teachers’ high school for women, the local university in Jos, Nigeria and continued to law school. Prior…
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Alisha Bjerregaard
Alisha Bjerregaard is a Schell Center Visiting Human Rights Fellow at Yale Law School and human rights consultant. Her work focuses on advocating for women's rights and reproductive rights. Prior to working as a consultant, Alisha was a Clinical Lecturer in Law and the clinical teaching fellow in the Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic at Yale Law School, where she supervised law students on a wide variety of human rights projects and co-taught the Lowenstein Clinic seminar. Previously, Alisha was a Legal Adviser in the Africa Program at the Center for Reproductive Rights. She was based in Nairobi, Kenya and worked on advocacy and litigation strategies to advance…
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Sylwia Gregorczyk-Abram
Sylwia Gregorczyk-Abram is an attorney-at-law and social activist, working with NGOs on developing a democratic civil society and protecting the rule of law in the Polish justice system. She is Co-Founder of the Justice Defense Committee and the Free Courts Foundation, both of which monitor and archive political pressure on judges and lawyers, giving them legal aid. She regularly participates in legislative processes in Poland's Parliament as an expert in parliamentary Constitutional Governance and Reform of the Justice System groups. She also presents on the state of the Polish justice system to the European Commission. Since 2017, Sylwia has led the organization of many demonstrations and protests in defense of the…
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Mohammad “Musa” Mahmodi
Mohammad “Musa” Mahmodi is a human rights lawyer and defender based in Kabul, Afghanistan. He served as Executive Director of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission for ten years, providing strategic direction for programs and activities to monitor, protect, and promote human rights in a conflict-affected country. As part of his work, he focused on transitional justice, women rights, children rights, human rights education, and investigations of human rights violations and abuses by all parties to the conflict. Musa also advocated for reviews of laws and policies of Afghanistan to comply with the international human rights instruments. He previously worked with the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, whereby he…
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Jingjing Zhang
Jingjing Zhang is a prominent Chinese environmental lawyer and a lecturer in law at the University of Maryland School of Law. She is the director of the Transnational Environmental Accountability Project and the founder of the China Accountability Project. She works on cutting-edge transnational environmental and climate lawsuits in the international development arena. Her team tests various legal avenues to ensure Chinese companies under China’s Belt and Road Initiative comply with environmental laws and international human rights norms in Africa and Latin America. Through her work as the inaugural litigation director of the Beijing-based Center for Legal Assistance to Pollution Victims between 1999 and 2008, Jingjing won several milestone environmental…
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Lai Yahaya
Lai Yahaya is a lawyer, political economy analyst, and public policy policy advisor with more than 20 years’ experience advising development finance institutions, senior government officials, and leading corporatations in Sub-Saharan Africa on infrastructure development, public private partnerships, and energy sector reform. He is currently Senior Special Assistant (Planning and Strategy) to President Muhammadu Buhari in Nigeria and was most recently Senior Policy Advisor to Rt. Hon. Raila Odinga, in his role as African Union High Representative for Infrastructure Development in Africa. Lai previously led the Senior Advisors Group of the Power Africa Initiative, working with a group of former Heads of State and industry leaders, advising them on how…
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Daniel Weisfield
Daniel Weisfield is a founder of Three Pillar Communities, a values-driven real estate investment firm. Three Pillar Communities acquires and operates manufactured housing communities in the United States. The firm has a two-part mission: to deliver safe, reliable housing to residents and safe, reliable returns to investors. As a consultant at McKinsey & Company, Daniel co-authored the McKinsey Global Institute’s report on tackling California’s high housing costs. His research on real estate and housing has been featured in the New York Times, the LA Times, and the Wall Street Journal. Daniel holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, an M.B.A. from Yale School of Management, and a B.A. in humanities,…
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Zoe Weinberg
Zoe Weinberg is the founder of ex/ante, a technology incubation fund that works to counter digital authoritarianism. Prior to graduate school, she worked on the Hillary for America campaign, serving as the assistant to the Chief Administrative Officer. She previously worked at the International Finance Corporation at the World Bank, based in Washington, D.C. and Nairobi. She worked on projects in over a dozen countries, including Somalia, South Sudan, Rwanda, and Liberia. Prior to IFC, she worked in Goldman Sachs’s alternative investments group in New York. Zoe has degrees from Harvard University, Yale Law School, and Stanford Graduate School of Business. At Yale Law School, she was a student director…
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