{"id":3796,"date":"2023-08-10T16:13:23","date_gmt":"2023-08-10T20:13:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/?page_id=422355"},"modified":"2026-04-16T19:15:35","modified_gmt":"2026-04-16T19:15:35","slug":"opics-leaders-in-residence-program-2023-class","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/academics\/jd-program\/scholars-fellowships-mentor-programs\/blume-public-interest-scholars-program\/opics-leaders-in-residence-program\/opics-leaders-in-residence-program-2023-class\/","title":{"rendered":"OPICS Public Interest Leaders in Residence Program 2023 Class"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0\u00a0\"\"Bradley Girard<\/span><\/h2>\n

Residency Dates: Wednesday, September 6 – Friday, September 8, 2023.\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

Bradley Girard is Litigation Counsel for Americans United for Separation of Church and State.<\/p>\n

Bradley returned to AU after serving as the Steven Gey Constitutional Litigation Fellow from 2015-17. He graduated from Georgetown Law in 2014. After law school he clerked for the Honorable Neal E. Kravitz on the D.C. Superior Court and on the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit for the Honorable Martha Craig Daughtrey.<\/p>\n

Immediately before returning to AU, Bradley was the clinical teaching fellow at Georgetown Law\u2019s Appellate Courts Immersion Clinic, where he taught students public-interest impact litigation in the federal courts of appeals and the U.S Supreme Court. He also earned an LLM in advocacy. During law school, Bradley interned at Gupta Wessler, Public Justice, Mehri & Skalet, and in the civil-rights division of the Institute for Public Representation. He also interned on the D.C. district court, in the chambers of the Honorable Gladys Kessler.<\/p>\n

Bradley has been published in the Georgetown Law Journal, the Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law & Policy, Law360, and SCOTUSblog. He\u2019s a member of the Advisory Council of People Parity\u2019s Project and a Board Member for Baltimore\u2019s Station North Tool Library. He enjoys arguing for hyphenation of phrasal adjectives and against two spaces after a period.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"Tamica Daniel<\/span><\/h2>\n

Residency Dates: Wednesday, September 20 – Friday, September 22, 2023<\/b><\/p>\n

Tamica H. Daniel is a Trial Attorney at the Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, Housing & Civil Enforcement Section. In this position, she develops, investigates, and litigates matters involving fair housing, fair lending, and discrimination in places of public accommodation. While her work spans several protected classes, her primary focus is discrimination on the basis of race, national origin, and sex. She has led several case teams to positive resolutions, advised trial teams that have obtained favorable verdicts, and mentored numerous staff and interns. Tamica has also led and co-led initiatives to increase the Housing & Civil Enforcement Section\u2019s community outreach and thereby enhance its enforcement work in the areas of race and national origin discrimination, sexual harassment, and the intersection of fair housing and criminal justice. Through this work, she has developed an interest and expertise in several burgeoning and long-standing fair housing issues.<\/p>\n

Tamica received her bachelor\u2019s degree from Northwestern University, where she majored in Social Policy and minored in African American Studies. She completed a joint degree program in law and a master\u2019s in public policy at Georgetown. Her master\u2019s thesis analyzed the relationship between a voluntary school desegregation plan and educational attainment for students of color in the wake of Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School Dist. No. 1. She also published a note in the Georgetown Law Journal entitled, \u201cBringing Real Choice to the Housing Choice Voucher Program: Addressing Voucher Discrimination under the Federal Fair Housing Act.\u201d She clerked for the Honorable Phyllis Thompson on the District of Columbia Court of Appeals. After her clerkship, she joined the Department of Justice through the Attorney General\u2019s Honors Program as a Trial Attorney in the Educational Opportunities Section. There, she focused primarily on school desegregation and student-on-student harassment.<\/p>\n

\"\"Rebecca Chan<\/span><\/h2>\n

Residency Dates: Wednesday, October 4 – Friday, October 6, 2023<\/b><\/p>\n

Rebecca is a staff attorney at the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project at the ACLU\u2019s national office in New York. Her litigation docket currently includes SisterSong v. Georgia, a case challenging a Georgia law banning abortion after approximately 6 weeks under the Georgia state constitution and Isaacson v. Brnovich, a case in federal court challenging an Arizona law banning abortions where the physician knows a patient seeks the abortion because of a fetal genetic anomaly and granting \u201cpersonhood\u201d status to fetuses, embryos, and fertilized eggs. Additionally, she works closely with ACLU state affiliates and the ACLU National Prison Project to advocate for incarcerated people seeking abortion care.<\/p>\n

Rebecca previously served as a law clerk to Judge Virginia Phillips on the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. She holds a J.D. from Yale Law School and a B.A. in chemistry and political science from Columbia University.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"Sarah Craven<\/span><\/h2>\n

Residency Dates: Wednesday, October 18 – Friday, October 20, 2023<\/b><\/p>\n

Sarah Craven, a policy advocate and attorney with expertise in sexual and reproductive health and rights, currently serves as the Director of the North American Office of UNFPA, the United Nations sexual and reproductive health agency. In this leadership role, Sarah advocates for UNFPA’s mandate which envisions a world where every pregnancy is wanted, every childbirth is safe and every young person can live to their full potential.<\/p>\n

Sarah has led advocacy and communication campaigns addressing a wide range of issues impacting the health, rights and dignity of women and girls including addressing gender-based violence in humanitarian settings, ending harmful practices including FGM and child marriage and preventing maternal mortalitiy and morbidities including obstetric fistula and uterine prolapse. Prior to her work at UNFPA, she held positions at the U.S. Department of State and on the legislative staff to U.S. Senators Tim Wirth of Colorado and Spark Matsunaga of Hawaii. She served as a policy advisor to the CEDPA grassroots women’s network during the 1994 International Conference on Population and the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, China. She is a founding board member of Kakenya’s Dream, an innovative girl’s leadership school in Western Kenya. Sarah holds a B.A. from Macalester College, a M.Phil from Cambridge University (UK) and a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center, where she was a Public Interest Law Scholar.<\/p>\n

In 2020, she was named one of Apolitical’s 100 most influential people in Gender Policy. She is the proud mother of Anna, Jack and Grace and a rescue beagles Eddie.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"Jon Devine<\/span><\/h2>\n

Residency Dates: Wednesday, October 25 – Friday, October 27, 2023<\/b><\/p>\n

Jon Devine leads NRDC\u2019s federal water policy team. His work focuses on implementing, defending, and strengthening the core programs under the Clean Water Act. Prior to working on water policy, he worked with NRDC\u2019s Health & Environment program for four years. Previously, he served as an attorney-adviser in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency\u2019s Office of General Counsel and also worked as an environmental specialist in Maine\u2019s Department of Environmental Protection. Devine graduated from Bowdoin College and received his JD from Georgetown University. He is based in NRDC\u2019s Washington, D.C., office.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"Anjana Samant<\/span><\/h2>\n

Residency Dates: Wednesday, November 1 – Friday, November 3, 2023<\/b><\/p>\n

Anjana Samant is a Senior Staff Attorney with the ACLU Women\u2019s Rights Project, where she focuses on challenging the child welfare system\u2019s policing and enforcement of raced and gendered notions of family and parenting, through constitutional litigation and movement support. She joined the ACLU with over 15 years of experience in civil rights litigation, movement lawyering, and intersectional justice work. Prior to joining the ACLU, Anjana served as an Assistant Attorney General in the Civil Rights Bureau of the New York State Attorney General\u2019s Office where she worked on several notable matters including the State\u2019s sexual harassment and corporate misconduct action against The Weinstein Company; New York State\u2019s litigation challenging the Muslim travel ban; investigations into anti-abortion \u201ccrisis pregnancy centers\u201d; algorithmic discrimination in credit decisions; and police misconduct and reform.<\/p>\n

Previously, Anjana worked as a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights on racial justice and government misconduct matters ranging from the unlawful arrests of journalists in Minneapolis-St. Paul to human rights violations perpetrated by the 2009 coup regime in Honduras. The foundation for her lawyering skills were in part developed while working as an associate at the employment law firm Outten & Golden LLP and a law clerk for Judge Martha Vazquez in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Mexico. After graduating from NYU School of Law where she was co-editor-in-chief of the NYU Review of Law & Social Change, Anjana worked with the late Prof. Derrick A. Bell as a constitutional law teaching fellow and researcher.<\/p>\n

When not lawyering, Anjana is protecting her container garden against ravenous squirrels, traveling to warmer climates, catching a play, and trying to get back into running & lifting weights. She is an avid fan of cocktails, naps, and Bob’s Burgers.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"Yosha Gunasekera<\/span><\/h2>\n

Residency Dates: Wednesday, November 15 – Friday, November 17, 2023<\/b><\/p>\n

Yosha Gunasekera is currently an attorney at the Innocence Project. She oversees the Intake and Strategic Initiatives Project, where she works on wrongful convictions in New York. Her work includes evaluating both DNA and non-DNA cases and taking on clients for post-conviction representation. Her project is pioneering in its non-DNA scope and for its focus on expediting exonerations that can normally take many years by working with a Conviction Integrity Unit instead of traditional litigation. Yosha focuses on the common reasons for wrongful convictions including false confessions, mistaken eyewitness identification, and prosecutorial misconduct.<\/p>\n

Prior to her role at the Innocence Project, Yosha was a public defender in Manhattan at the Legal Aid Society. Yosha represented hundreds of indigent individuals in the criminal legal system and advocated for clients at every stage. This included arguing for their release at their arraignment, demanding suppression of evidence obtained illegally by the police in written motions, arguing for cases to be dismissed because they are not legally sufficient, and taking cases to trial.<\/p>\n

For nearly eight years, Yosha was an associate board member for the Women\u2019s Prison Association, where she worked on empowering women to redefine their lives in the face of injustice and incarceration.<\/p>\n

Yosha has been published in Marie Claire, Huffington Post, The Hill and more. She has also appeared as an on-air legal analyst on BBC, HLN, Law and Crime, and Fox. Yosha received her J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0\u00a0Bradley Girard Residency Dates: Wednesday, September 6 – Friday, September 8, 2023.\u00a0 Bradley Girard is Litigation Counsel for Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Bradley returned to AU […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2567,"featured_media":0,"parent":3678,"menu_order":60,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_price":"","_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_header":"","_tribe_default_ticket_provider":"","_tribe_ticket_capacity":"0","_ticket_start_date":"","_ticket_end_date":"","_tribe_ticket_show_description":"","_tribe_ticket_show_not_going":false,"_tribe_ticket_use_global_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_global_stock_level":"","_global_stock_mode":"","_global_stock_cap":"","_tribe_rsvp_for_event":"","_tribe_ticket_going_count":"","_tribe_ticket_not_going_count":"","_tribe_tickets_list":"[]","_tribe_ticket_has_attendee_info_fields":false,"footnotes":"","_tec_slr_enabled":"","_tec_slr_layout":""},"class_list":["post-3796","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"ticketed":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/academics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3796","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/academics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/academics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/academics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2567"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/academics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3796"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/academics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3796\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24211,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/academics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3796\/revisions\/24211"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/academics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3678"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/academics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}