Hosted by Law Students for Reproductive Justice

MAGGIE CROSBY is a lawyer on the staff of the ACLU of Northern California. She has brought many cases involving reproductive privacy. She argued two cases before the California Supreme Court to protect the reproductive rights of poor women and young women: in 1981, the Court ruled that restrictions on Medi-Cal funding of abortion for indigent women violated the California Constitution (Committee to Defend Reproductive Rights v. Myers), and in 1997, the Court ruled that a state law requiring teenagers to obtain parental or court consent for abortion violated the California Constitution (American Academy of Pediatrics v. Lungren). She also worked closely with Senator Sheila Kuehl in authoring California’s Reproductive Privacy Act, which protects birth control and abortion choices, and the California Comprehensive Sex Health and HIV/AIDS Prevention Education Act, which ensures that sex education in California schools is comprehensive, bias-free and medically accurate. She received her J.D. degree from Yale Law School and her A.B. degree from Bryn Mawr College. She served as a law clerk to Robert F. Peckham, Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California.

PHYLLIDA BURLINGAME is the Sex Education Policy Director at the ACLU of Northern California. Her publications include Sex Education in California Public Schools: Are Students Learning What They Need to Know?, a survey of sex education programs in 150 school districts across the state, and Sex, Lies and Politics: Abstinence-Only Curricula in California Public Schools. She played an instrumental role in the successful effort to pass two model sex education laws in California, and she has worked with state agencies, parents, and community members to ensure the laws’ implementation. She was previously a Senior Research Associate at the Applied Research Center and a consultant to the Center for Community Change and the Center for Law and Social Policy. She received her B.A. degree from Harvard.

SHANNON LEONG is currently an Associate at Orrick, Herrington, & Sutcliffe LLP where she conducts research and writes motions for general litigation matters. She is currently a cooperating attorney for the ACLU on pending legislation to prevent shackling of pregnant inmates. In 2010, Shannon was a Litigation Fellow for the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, where she persuaded administrative agencies to strike down restrictive abortion counseling guidelines, researched issues for potential litigation on sex education and adolescent health and lobbied state and federal legislators regarding reproductive health issues. She has also worked for the Office of the Appellate Defender in New York; The Forum for Women, Law, and Development Kathmandu, Nepal; and Nera Economic Consulting in San Francisco. She received a B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley and a J.D. from the New York University School of Law.

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