Maggie Filler, JD ’12
Miles L. Rubin Award Recipient

Maggie Filler, JD ’12, is an attorney with the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division in the Special Litigation Section, where she works to protect the rights of persons in state and local prisons and jails. Prior to joining DOJ, Maggie was an attorney with the Roderick and Solange MacArthur Justice Center in Chicago, Illinois, and a clinical fellow with the Northwestern Law School Bluhm Legal Clinic. At MacArthur, Maggie focused her practice on pursuing justice for those wrongly convicted of serious crimes and on strategic litigation on behalf of persons who endured years of extreme solitary confinement in prisons across the country. Maggie previously worked at Prisoners’ Legal Services of Massachusetts, a statewide legal services organization for persons incarcerated in Massachusetts jails, houses of correction and prisons. Her focus at Prisoners’ Legal Services included disability rights, access to medical care, conditions of confinement and legislative reform.

Maggie is a former law clerk to the Honorable Marsha S. Berzon of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and the Honorable Myron H. Thompson of the Middle District of Alabama. She is a graduate of Wesleyan University and Stanford Law School.

Katrina Eiland, JD ’10
Miles L. Rubin Award Award Recipient

Katrina Eiland, JD ’10, is the Managing Attorney of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project’s California Office. She has a decade of experience litigating complex immigrants’ rights and other civil and workers’ rights cases. She has been counsel in more than two dozen such suits in federal court. For the past three and a half years at IRP, she has litigated many high impact cases on behalf of immigrants, several of which have challenged immigration enforcement abuses by federal and local law enforcement agencies. For example, Eiland played a lead role in briefing the recent appeals and petitions for certiorari in Ortega Melendres v. Maricopa County, a successful lawsuit against Sheriff Joe Arpaio and the Sheriff’s Office for racial profiling and harassment of Latino drivers in Arizona. She was also counsel in Amadei v. McAleenan, a suit challenging Customs and Border Protection’s unlawful search and seizure of passengers disembarking from a domestic flight, which resulted in the government agreeing to measures to prevent such incidents from happening again.

In addition, Eiland is lead counsel in the successful challenge to the government’s arbitrary termination of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival grants, in which she obtained an injunction requiring that the government provide notice and an opportunity to be heard before terminating any class member’s DACA. Eiland argued the case before the Ninth Circuit.  She is also lead counsel in U.T. v. Barr, which challenges the government’s “safe” third country removals of asylum seekers to dangerous neighboring countries. She has also played key roles in other asylum litigation, including Grace v. Sessions, a challenge to policies restricting asylum claims by survivors of domestic and gang violence, and East Bay v. Barr, a challenge to the government’s asylum bar based on an individual’s transit through a third country.

Eiland is a graduate of Stanford Law School and the University of California, Los Angeles. Following a clerkship with the Honorable Keith P. Ellison of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas, Eiland was first a Civil Rights Fellow and then associate at Goldstein, Borgen, Dardarian & Ho, where she litigated complex wage and hour, employment discrimination, disability access, and voting rights cases. She received the ACLU of Southern California’s 2014 Voting Rights Award for her work representing Latino residents in the City of Anaheim under the California Voting Rights Act. Prior to joining the ACLU, Eiland was also an associate at Outten & Golden LLP where she represented employees in wage and hour and discrimination class actions, including cases on behalf of DACA recipients unfairly denied employment. In 2017, she was selected as a “Rising Star for Northern California” by Super Lawyers. She will participate in several events during the week of October 12.

A recording of Eiland’s keynote address is available here: “Resilience in Resistance: When Immigrants’ Rights Are Under Relentless Attack.”

David Owens, JD/MA ’10
Miles L. Rubin Public Interest Award Recipient

David B. Owens is a partner at Loevy & Loevy. Owens joined Loevy & Loevy in 2012, and his practice is national, representing clients from Washington and California, in Wisconsin and Illinois, and throughout the South. Owens is dedicated to zealous, client-centered advocacy on behalf of those seeking vindication for the violation of their civil rights and focuses on cases involving wrongful convictions, police shootings and other excessive force, false arrests, free speech rights, race discrimination, and other violations of the U.S. Constitution.

A proud Seattle native, Owens completed his undergraduate at the University of Washington. Owens later earned his J.D. and an M.A. in Philosophy from Stanford University in 2010. At Stanford Law, Owens was the Senior Articles Editor of the Stanford Law Review, a Member Editor of the Stanford Environmental Law Journal, received the Gerald Gunther Prize for Outstanding Performance in Federal Courts, earned Pro Bono distinction, and served as a fellow in the Levin Center for Public Interest. He was also a member of the Stanford Supreme Court Litigation Clinic, where he worked on numerous cases at the United States Supreme Court, most notably representing a number of civil rights groups in banking regulation litigation and successfully representing an indigent criminal defendant in Flores-Figueroa v. United States, 556 U.S. 646 (2009), which avoided harsh application of a mandatory-minimum sentencing statute. During law school, Owens also worked for the ACLU of Washington Foundation; a nonprofit in Lagos, Nigeria institute Miranda-derived protections against coerced confessions; and a boutique firm in San Francisco specializing in environmental protection issues.

Owens clerked for the Honorable Diane P. Wood of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and the Honorable Myron H. Thompson of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Alabama in Montgomery, Alabama. Owens is Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago, where he co-teaches in the school’s pro bono wrongful conviction clinic, The Exoneration Project. Owens is also dedicated to pro bono work. In addition to representing clients with the Exoneration Project, Owens serves as a member of the Coalition for the Fair Sentencing of Youth in Illinois; represents juveniles who were given life sentences but are now entitled to new sentencing hearings under Miller v. Alabama; and representing claimants in proceedings before the Illinois Torture Inquiry Commission. At the University of Chicago, Owens has also collaborated with other clinics, including trying a case on behalf of a criminal defendant with the Federal Criminal Justice Clinic. Other pro bono work includes writing amicus briefs in district and appellate courts in civil rights and criminal cases.

Salena Copeland, JD ’07
Miles L. Rubin Public Interest Award Recipient

Salena Copeland is the Executive Director of the Legal Aid Association of California (LAAC) and spends much of her time coordinating statewide legislative and administrative advocacy, while also supervising a small staff who work to support the entire Interest on Lawyers Trust Accounts (IOLTA) legal aid community through trainings, online coordination and resource-sharing, and member discounts. Her biggest recent success is as a major organizer in the effort to increase the Equal Access Fund, a fund that supports nearly 100 California legal nonprofits. The efforts resulted in a $5 million increase in the funds at the same time LAAC and others were pushing for the extension or repeal of a sunset on a separate $7-9 million/year fund. That campaign was also successful.

Salena, a Texan by birth, but Californian by choice, is a 2007 graduate of Stanford Law School, a member of the State Bar of California Standing Committee on the Delivery of Legal Services, a co-chair of the California Commission on Access to Justice Rural Task Force, a member of the Amicus Committee of the Access Commission, an active member of the Bench Bar Coalition, and the 2010 recipient of the Bench Bar Coalition Legal Services Provider of the Year Award. She also serves on a number of statewide planning committees dedicated to improving access to justice for low and moderate-income Californians, including the Campaign for Justice. She lives in the East Bay with her partner, Matthew Liebman (SLS JD ’06), and their children.

Catherine Crump, JD ’04
Miles L. Rubin Public Interest Award Recipient

Catherine Crump is an Assistant Clinical Professor of Law and Associate Director of the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic at Berkeley Law. An experienced litigator specializing in constitutional matters, she has represented a broad range of clients seeking to vindicate their First and Fourth Amendment rights. She also has extensive experience litigating to compel the disclosure of government records under the Freedom of Information Act.

Professor Crump’s primary interest is the impact of new technologies on civil liberties. Representative matters include serving as counsel in the ACLU’s challenge to the National Security Agency’s mass collection of Americans’ call records; representing artists, media outlets and others challenging a federal internet censorship law, and representing a variety of clients seeking to invalidate the government’s policy of conducting suspicionless searches of laptops and other electronic devices at the international border.

Prior to coming to Berkeley, Professor Crump served as a staff attorney at the ACLU for nearly nine years. Before that, she was a law clerk for Judge M. Margaret McKeown at the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

David Sapp, JD ‘05
Miles L. Rubin Public Interest Award Recipient

David Sapp joined the ACLU of Southern California in 2009 as a staff attorney.  During his tenure Mr. Sapp has focused primarily on education and juvenile justice issues. He worked on Casey A. v. Gundry, a case regarding failure of a juvenile probation camp to provide minimally adequate education and rehabilitation services to detained youth. He served as counsel in the Reed v. State of California, which addressed the inequitable distribution of teacher layoffs in inner city schools in Los Angeles, and Doe v. State of California, which focused on the State’s failure to ensure districts provide a free public education system as required by the California Constitution.  Prior to joining the ACLU, David clerked for the Honorable Raymond C. Fisher on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and was a Skadden Fellow at Advocates for Children’s Services in Durham, North Carolina, where he represented students in school discipline and special education proceedings. He began his legal career clerking for the Honorable Myron H. Thompson on the District Court for the Middle District of Alabama.

Lynne Echenberg, JD ’02
Miles L. Rubin Public Interest Award Recipient

Lynne Echenberg has been working in the child welfare and juvenile justice fields for over a decade. Following law school, Lynne received a Skadden Fellowship to work at the Legal Aid Society’s Juvenile Rights Division (JRD), in New York, representing young people being discharged from
foster care in the Bronx Family Court. She then worked as an attorney in the Children’s Aid Society’s (CAS) Office of Public Policy and Client Advocacy where she advocated on behalf of children and youth involved in CAS programs and developed the proposal that launched the Next Generation Center. Lynne is currently the Director of the Next Generation Center, a multiservice center for disconnected youth in the South Bronx. Lynne serves on the Advisory Boards of Represent!, a publication written by and for foster youth, and the Resilience Advocacy Project.

Previously, at the New York City Administration for Children’s Services (ACS), Lynne served as Special Assistant to Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta and then developed and piloted a mentoring program for young people aging out of foster care in the ACS’ Office of Youth Development. At Stanford, Lynne interned at Legal Services for Children and the Haywood Burns Institute for Juvenile Justice Fairness & Equity at the Youth Law Center in San Francisco, as well as the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the JRD. She taught a course on children and the law at Stanford University, and represented children in special education and school discipline proceedings at the East Palo Alto Community Law Project.

Julia R. Wilson ’98
Inaugural Miles L. Rubin Public Interest Award Recipient

Julia R. Wilson currently serves as the Executive Director of the Legal Aid Association of California (LAAC) and the Public Interest Clearinghouse (PIC). As Executive Director of the sister organizations, she is responsible for leading statewide advocacy eff orts on behalf of the legal services delivery system, undertaking multiple statewide strategic planning initiatives, and serving as the legal services community’s liaison to key access to justice partners.

Ms. Wilson graduated summa cum laude from the University of California at Los Angeles and with distinction from Stanford Law School. Before her work with LAAC and PIC, Ms. Wilson spent almost seven years at the Legal Aid Society of San Mateo County. Ms. Wilson first obtained funding to create her own direct legal services program, focusing on the timely intersection of national and local welfare reform and the Americans with Disabilities Act. She then received a prestigious national Equal Justice Works (then NAPIL) Fellowship to expand and continue the work of her project. Ms. Wilson later became the Legal Aid Society’s first Pro Bono Coordinator and eventually also served as Directing Attorney, before being selected as the Director of the Legal Aid Association of California (LAAC).

After almost three years of leading LAAC, she was tapped in 2007 to become the joint Executive Director of LAAC and its partner organization, the Public Interest Clearinghouse. Ms. Wilson was also appointed to the State Bar of California’s Standing Committee on the Delivery of Legal Services and is active in numerous statewide collaborations relevant to PIC and LAAC’s work, including the Bench Bar Coalition and committees of the California Access to Justice Commission.

Press Release

Stanford Law School Honors Public Interest Attorneys Shannon Price Minter and Julia R. Wilson with Public Service Awards