Welcome to our new employees: Jen Griego, Associate Director of Alumni Engagement; Erin Dineen, Alumni Engagement Officer; Samantha Zepeda, Annual Fund Officer; Sohayla Farman, Publications & Communications Specialist for the Robbins Collection; and Jann Dudley, Associate Director, Berkeley Center for Law & Technology; Purba Mukerjee ’15, Environmental Health Fellow, Environmental Law Clinic; and new faculty members Abbye Atkinson, Adam-Badawi, and Joy Milligan. Read more about these great new additions.
Sohayla Farman, Publications & Communications Specialist, Robbins Collection
The Robbins Collection is pleased to announce that Sohayla Farman will be joining us as our Publications & Communications Specialist. Sohayla, who has a B.A. in English, is a recent graduate of UC Berkeley. Prior to joining Robbins, Sohayla worked as an editorial assistant for UC Press, and she worked for UC Berkeley’s alumni magazine, California. In her free time, Sohayla enjoys reading the fantastically crowded narratives of Fyodor Dostoevsky, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Zadie Smith. Sohayla is a first-generation American, and she is the first in her family to have attended UC Berkeley.
Jann Dudley, Associate Director, Berkeley Center for Law & Technology
BCLT is pleased to welcome its new Associate Director Jann Dudley. Jann has extensive experience in law firm
marketing, client development and branding. In her career, she has served as marketing manager or director at Orrick, Morgan Lewis, and Archer Norris, among other Bay area firms.
She is a long-time member of the Legal Marketing Association (LMA), a frequent speaker at its events, a member of the Board of Directors of its Bay Area Chapter, and Treasurer-elect for its Western Region.
Most recently, Jann has been a consultant to the WorldWideWomen Foundation, in support of its mission to empower, educate and promote leadership among women and girls through its global resource center and annual Girls’ Festival.
Jann has received numerous awards from the LMA for her campaigns and marketing work, including most recently, First Place for Promotional Piece (2016). Other awards include the LMA’s Rella Lossey Award (2015) and Member of the Year Award (2000).
“The BCLT faculty directors and staff are thrilled to welcome Jann Dudley to the Berkeley family,” says Jim Dempsey, BCLT executive director. “Her insights and energy will help us deepen and expand our relationships with the Bay Area law firms that support us and hire our graduates. Everyone at the law school will enjoy working with her.”
Purba Mukerjee ’15, Environmental Health Fellow, Environmental Law Clinic (ELC)
Purba comes to us with a master’s degree in chemistry in addition to her J.D., and a strong desire to focus on environmental health issues. She will accordingly help to develop our docket related to reducing exposures to toxic chemicals, with ELC’s usual focus on addressing root causes (bad policy, inadequate legislation, insufficiently incentivized innovation sector) rather than merely addressing symptoms (tort suits and Superfund cleanups).
Purba will join existing ELC fellows Britton Schwartz and Ana Vohryzek, who will job-share in the coming year and continue to advance ELC’s environmental justice docket.”
Jen Griego, Associate Director of Alumni Engagement
Jen will coordinate the global alumni engagement platform, with the goals of building affinity among alumni and with the school, and increasing philanthropic (annual fund) and activity-based support for the school. Jen has 25 years of experience as a senior creative marketing and communications director– starting with Power Bar, and most recently with Sungevity. She is a terrific project manager and planner. Jen holds a BA in Fine Arts from Vassar College and an MFA in Fine Arts from UC Berkeley.
Erin Dineen, Alumni Engagement Officer
Erin will be working closely with Jen and the rest of the team on our global alumni engagement platform. Upon graduation from UC Berkeley in English, Erin spent 25 years in London, with Sony Music Europe and most recently with Soho Artists. Erin managed the international promotion and release of the likes of Oasis, Gipsy Kings, Jeff Buckley, Travis, Paul Weller, Harry Connick Jr., Suede, Teenage Fanclub, Primal Scream, Fatboy Slim, Judas Priest, to name a few. Adding a bit more glamour to her already glamorous life, Erin also brilliantly managed the Berkeley in Britain Alumni Club for at least 20 of those years. Many of you met Erin last year when she worked on our team briefly.
Samantha Zepeda, Annual Fund Officer
Samantha will be working closely with Holly Fincke (Associate Director Annual Campaigns) in support of the four or five annual fund campaigns, with the goal of expanding discretionary support for the school and deepening our pipeline of major giving prospects. Samantha joins us from the Haas School, where she served as gift and data associate. Prior to coming to Berkeley, Samantha was development manager at Alisa Ann Ruch Burn Foundation and program manager at RuffaloCODY. Samantha has extensive skills in making sense of complex data and is a natural fundraiser. Samantha holds a BA from University of the Pacific in Global Studies, Spanish and Anthropology, and spent her junior year at Pontifica Universidad Catolica del Ecuador.
Abbye Atkinson
Abbye Atkinson will teach Contracts and consumer law courses such as Secured Transactions.
Atkinson’s new gig represents a homecoming of sorts. A Stanford Law School fellow and lecturer, she earned her undergraduate degree in Dramatic Arts at UC Berkeley—where she was a Regent’s Scholar and received the Mark Goodson Prize for distinction in the performance arts.
At Harvard Law School, she served as a research and teaching assistant to Professor Elizabeth Warren, now a U.S. senator, on a consumer bankruptcy project and Bankruptcy Law course.
“She was a master teacher who always encouraged me to think about the law’s real-life implications,” Atkinson says. “That’s been a huge influence in how I’ve approached my scholarship.”
Atkinson has enjoyed a rewarding and varied career, working as a special-education teacher, a clerk for two federal judges, and an associate with Gibson Dunn & Crutcher in San Francisco. At Stanford, her research probed bankruptcy law’s impact on the economically vulnerable.
“Bankruptcy Law concerns itself with helping people who are in a precarious financial position rebuild themselves,” she says. “We often think about that in a middle- or upper-class context. But if bankruptcy is an important mechanism to let people reboot financially, why does it exclude people on the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum—people whose financial troubles are often borne of bigger social issues?”
Another strong pull for Atkinson: the recent explosion of consumer justice work at Berkeley Law. “It’ll be great to get involved in that community,” she says.
Adam-Badawi
Adam Badawi will teach Contracts and business law courses such as Business Associations.
While he enjoyed his two years as a University of Chicago law fellow and lecturer and seven years as a professor at Washington University of St. Louis, Badawi—who earned three degrees from UC Berkeley—relished a chance to come back.
“There’s nowhere like it,” he says. The prospect of joining the business law program, which he says is “influential, energetic, and thinks about research and teaching in innovative ways,” made returning to Boalt “an easy decision.”
Badawi clerked on the U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals and practiced at Munger, Tolles & Olson for before entering academia. His research focuses on shareholder litigation, how boards operate, and how debt contracts and corporate governance interact. A current project explores the influence lawyers and law firms have on the public disclosures they help draft for clients.
“What draws me to business-related research is the importance that effective corporate governance has for producing growth and employment in our economy,” he says. “It helps that there are massive amounts of data available on how firms and corporate governance interact.”
Currently co-writing a Business Associations casebook, Badawi wants his students “to think about how lawyers can improve deals rather than just win the litigation that results when those deals turn problematic … I know the Berkeley student body’s love of intellectual engagement and commitment to its ideals will never go away. That makes for a dynamic classroom and I can’t wait to be a part of it.”
Joy Milligan
Joy Milligan will teach Civil Procedure and a survey course in antidiscrimination law.
The more Milligan interacted with Berkeley Law’s faculty, the more she wanted to join it. “The depth and diversity of their work is truly world-class,” she says.
Her research considers the impact of American law and political institutions on entrenched inequality, specifically how the civil rights movement links with the administrative state’s institutional design. One recent project compared the trajectories of racial and religious discrimination in the Supreme Court’s constitutional jurisprudence.
“The fundamental question in civil rights law is why do we still see so much entrenched inequality— particularly racial inequality after the ‘Civil Rights Revolution?’” Milligan says. “Why has law not been more effective in bridging this gap? That issue underlies my research.”
Currently finishing her Ph.D. in Berkeley Law’s Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, Milligan has earned degrees from Harvard (undergraduate), New York University (JD), and Princeton (MPA).
After law school, she worked for the NAACP’s Legal Defense & Educational Fund and clerked on the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Looking ahead to teaching at Berkeley Law, she values a pragmatic approach.
“In Civil Procedure, I want students to learn the key practical tools and know how to use them, because I’ve seen firsthand how procedure impacts the fate of cases,” Milligan says. “In Antidiscrimination Law, I want students to understand where the stumbling blocks are for civil rights plaintiffs.”