Our Team

Brittny Bottorff

Brittny Bottorff lives in San Francisco and works as an attorney with the Maier Law Group. She specializes in labor and employment law and cybersecurity and data privacy issues. Brittny served on the Board of Trustees for San Francisco Playhouse from 2009 until 2016, and was a co-founder of LitUp Writers, a creative nonfiction humor reading series that produced live shows in San Francisco. Brittny graduated from the University of Texas School of Law in 1996. An avid audio story enthusiast, Brittny spends much of her idle (and not so idle) moments listening to a variety of podcasts. Her favorite, of course, is Life of the Law.

Jessica McKellar

Jessica McKellar is an entrepreneur and open source community leader from San Francisco. She is a former Director for the Python Software Foundation, an O'Reilly Open Source Award recipient, and a Forbes 30 under 30 honoree in the enterprise software category. McKellar is founder and CTO of Pilot, a bookeeping firm powered by software. She holds MS and BS degrees in Computer Science from MIT.

Osagie Obasogie

Osagie Obasogie J.D., Ph.D., is the Haas Distinguished Chair and Professor of Bioethics in the Joint Medical Program and School of Public Health. He began his career at the University of California, Hastings College of Law as an Associate and then full Professor of Law, teaching courses on Constitutional Law, race and law and the health sciences. He joined Berkeley in 2016. Obasogie is a Soros Justice Fellow with the Open Society Institute. His writings have spanned both academic and public audiences, with journal articles in venues such as the Law & Society Review, University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law, Stanford Technology Law Review, and the Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics along with commentaries in outlets including the New York Times, Slate, the Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, and New Scientist. His first book, Blinded By Sight: Seeing Race Through the Eyes of the Blind, was published by Stanford University Press. Obasogie received his B.A. with distinction from Yale University, his J.D. from Columbia Law School where he was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar, and his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley where he was a fellow with the National Science Foundation.

Gladys Oroma -4 posts

My name is Gladys Oroma. I am a journalist based in northern Uganda. I have worked as a reporter and writer for a number of local, national and international media organizations. For the local media organizations I've worked mostly for radio stations. For all these different media organizations, I write on a number of issues: conflict and post-conflict and these issues range from human rights violations and abuses, the environment, education and health. For international, I have worked as a freelance reporter, producing radio feature stories where we looked at post-conflict issues. For the Institute on War and Peace Reporting, we produced Facing Justice. We looked at different issues facing the people of northern Uganda post conflict. Currently, I work as a script writer and editor for different projects in northern Uganda Media Club, an organization that was started by practicing and non-practicing journalists in the region. We offer trainings to the different local leaders in the region to help them understand how the media works and operates. And we have a number of donor funded projects that we do on post-conflict and especially the issues derailing peace and how best to promote peace in the region. That is what I do. Listen to more of Gladys Oromoa's reporting at the Institute for War and Peace Reporting and visit the Northern Uganda's Media Club.

Ian Coss -4 posts

Ian Coss divides his time between pursuing a PhD in ethnomusicology at Boston University and producing audio for programs including The World, Studio 360, Afropop Worldwide and BBC’s Cultural Frontline. He has directed and contributed to several audio documentary projects, including “Radio Contact”—produced for a museum exhibit on wireless technology at Harvard University—and “40 Stories,” an oral history of the east coast’s first shelter for survivors of domestic violence. He also hosts a regular music program on his local community radio station, 102.9 WBCA. As a scholar of music, media and migration, Ian has conducted fieldwork in Haiti, Indonesia and around the Northeastern U.S., with a focus on immigrant radio cultures. Follow his work at iancoss.com.

Kirsten Jusewicz-Haidle -9 posts

Kirsten Jusewicz-Haidle is an upstate New York native living in the Bay Area. She started doing radio at KPFA 94.1FM in Berkeley as part of their Apprenticeship program. She produced and hosted a science ephemera show at KPFA’s sister station KPFB before interning for Life of the Law. When she’s not producing a story or doing post-production work for Life of the Law, she likes to climb, read, and loudly engage with pop culture.

Rachael Cain -3 posts

I’m an urban planner and attorney that works with municipalities and other governmental entities on development projects and contracts, local self-governance issues, civil litigation, and municipal court prosecution. I’m especially interested in the built environment’s capability to shape socially and environmentally sustainable outcomes. I hold a Bachelor of Arts in Urban Sociology and Landscape Studies from Smith College, a Master of Science in Urban and Regional Planning from UMass Amherst, and a Juris Doctor from Texas A&M University School of Law.

Sarah Marshall

Sarah Marshall's writing on gender, scandal, and law has appeared in The Believer, The New Republic, and Buzzfeed, among other publications. She is at work on a book about indigent defense in the South.

Tony Gannon -4 posts

Tony Gannon is a documentary filmmaker and creative audio producer. Since 2002, he has edited films, produced/directed art documentaries and worked on commercial brand videos as an editor and director. In addition to Life of the Law, Tony produces and audio engineers Classic Showbiz with Kliph Nesteroff (not yet released via Howl), and two branded podcasts. He has develop one season of his own podcast, Subframe, and is working on a second season. He is a creative partner at Goldwood Media based in Oakland, CA.

Adam Lauridsen

Adam Lauridsen is a partner at the law firm of Keker, Van Nest & Peters, where he specializes in complex civil litigation. Before joining Keker, he clerked for the Honorable William Schwarzer of the Northern District of California and the Honorable David Levi of the Eastern District of California. He received a J.D. from Harvard Law School, an M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge and a B.A. in Social Studies from Harvard College. Adam is the founder of Fast Break, the San Jose Mercury News’ Golden State Warriors Fan Blog, and has been a credentialed writer on the Warriors for over a decade. He lives in San Francisco’s Mission District with his wife.

Ajay Mehrotra

Ajay K. Mehrotra is Director and Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation. Professor Mehrotra was formerly Associate Dean for Research, Professor of Law, and Louis F. Niezer Faculty Fellow at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law. He is also an adjunct Professor of History at Indiana University and an Affiliated Faculty member of the Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop on Political Theory and Policy Analysis. He is the author of Making the Modern American Fiscal State: Law, Politics and the Rise of Progressive Taxation, 1877-1929 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). He is the co-editor (with Isaac William Martin and Monica Prasad) of The New Fiscal Sociology: Taxation in Comparative and Historical Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). From 2007-2011, he was Co-director (with Michael Grossberg) of the Indiana University Center for Law, Society & Culture.

Amy Bach

Amy Bach is President and Executive Director of Measures for Justice, founded in 2011 as a follow-up to her acclaimed book, Ordinary Injustice: How America Holds Court, which won the 2010 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. Amy was awarded an Echoing Green Fellowship, a Soros Justice Media Fellowship, a special J. Anthony Lukas citation and a Radcliffe Fellowship. The goal of Measures for Justice is to flag and fix systemic problems in the American criminal justice system by creating a system of measures to allow counties to see how well or poorly their justice systems are providing the public with basic legal services. She lives in Rochester, New York.

Anna Maria Marshall

Anna-Maria Marshall is Associate Professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she also has an appointment in the College of Law. She received her J.D. from the University of Virginia (1985) and her Ph.D. in Political Science from Northwestern University (1999). Her research is broadly focused on studying the relationship between law and social change. Her first book, Confronting Sexual Harassment: The Law and Politics of Everyday Life, analyzed the institutional and political foundations of legal consciousness when women navigated problems in the workplace. More recently, her work has focused on law and social movements and cause lawyering in the environmental justice movement and LGBT activism. She co-edited the volume, Queer Mobilizations: LGBT Activists Confront the Law with Scott Barclay and Mary Bernstein.

Annie Bunting

Annie Bunting is an Associate Professor in the Law and Society program at York University in Toronto, teaching in the areas of social justice and human rights. Professor Bunting is a graduate of York, having studied law at Osgoode Hall Law School (1988). She received her LL.M. from the London School of Economics and Political Science (1991) and her S.J.D. from the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto (1999). Her research expertise includes socio-legal studies of marriage and childhoods, feminist international law, and culture, religion and law. She has published articles in Social and Legal Studies, Journal of Law and Society, Canadian Journal of Human Rights, and chapters in various book collections. Her recent edited collections include: Marriage by Force? Contestation over Consent and Coercion in Africa (with Lawrance and Roberts) Ohio Univ. Press (2016); and Contemporary Slavery: Popular Rhetoric and Political Practice (with Joel Quirk), UBC Press, Law & Society Series (2017).

Austin Sarat -1 post

Austin Sarat is Associate Dean of the Faculty and William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College and Hugo L. Black Visiting Senior Scholar at the University of Alabama School of Law. Professor Sarat is a pioneering figure in the development of legal study in the liberal arts, of the humanistic study of law, and of the cultural study of law. He is also an internationally renown scholar of capital punishment, specializing in efforts to understand its social, political, and cultural significance in the United States. Professor Sarat founded both Amherst College’s Department of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought and the national scholarly association, The Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities. He served as President of the Law and Society Association and of the Consortium of Undergraduate Law and Justice Programs. He is author or editor of more than ninety books including Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty, The Road to Abolition?: The Future of Capital Punishment in the United States. He is currently writing a book entitled Hollywood’s Law: Film, Fatherhood, and the Legal Imagination. He is editor of the journal Law, Culture and the Humanities and Studies in Law, Politics, and Society. His public writing has appeared in The New Republic, The Guardian, The Boston Globe, The National Law Journal, The Providence Journal, The Los Angeles Times ,The American Prospect, and The Daily Beast and he has been a commentator or guest on HuffPost Live, National Public Radio, All Things Considered, Morning Edition, Public Television’s The News Hour, Odyssey, Democracy Now, RT International, ABC World News Tonight, MSNBC, Aljazeera America, All In with Chris Hayes, and The O’Reilly Factor. A profile of him in US News and World Report noted that he is “one of the best loved professors at Amherst College” and praised his teaching for combining “innovation and inspiration.”

Ben Fleury-Steiner -1 post

Ben Fleury-Steiner is Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice at the University of Delaware. His research focuses on the intersections of inequality, punishment, and social control in a variety of institutional contexts, including death penalty judgments, the identity politics of criminal justice policy and lawmaking, and the governance of historically marginalized groups. He is the author of four books: The Pains of Mass Imprisonment. New York, NY: Routledge. 2013. (co-authored with Jamie Longazel); Disposable Heroes: America’s Betrayal of African-American Veterans. 2012. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield; Dying Inside: The HIV/AIDS Ward at Limestone Prison. 2008. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, and Jurors’ Stories of Death: How America’s Death Penalty Invests in Inequality. 2004. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Carroll Seron

Carroll Seron is the Associate Dean of Academic Programs and Professor of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California Irvine, School of Social Ecology where she studies the organizations and professions of law. The Business of Practicing Law: The Work Lives of Solo and Small-Firm Lawyers takes up the timely question of legal advertising and solicitation in shaping lawyers’ professional identities. Her book with co-authors Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, Bonnie Oglinsky and Robert Suate, The Part-Time Paradox: Time Norms, Professional Life and Family and Gender was among the very first to cast a sociological gaze on policies and practices around work-family balance. In current research, Seron is studying the timely issue of indebtedness on law students’ career paths. Her current work also has taken a comparative turn. In dramatic contrast to law, engineering remains a white, male bastion. With Susan Silbey (MIT) and Brian Rubineau (Cornell), this project presents new insight into the remarkably persistent gender gap in engineering. Building on this, Seron has recently given talks in Europe and Australia exploring “The Changing Landscape of Women in the Professions: Why Women Study Law and not Engineering.”

David Onek

David Onek is host of City Visions on San Francisco NPR-affiliate KALW. He is a long-time criminal justice reformer who has served as Executive Director of the Northern California Innocence Project at Santa Clara University Law School, as a Commissioner on the San Francisco Police Commission, Executive Director of the Berkeley Center for Criminal Justice at UC Berkeley Law School, and as Deputy Director of San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s Office of Criminal Justice. David has taught as a Lecturer at UC Berkeley Law School and as an Adjunct Professor at UC Hastings Law School. He was also the creator and host of the Criminal Justice Conversations Podcast, a co-production of UC Berkeley Law School and the UC Berkeley School of Journalism. He lives in San Francisco’s Bernal Heights neighborhood with his wife Kara Dukakis and their two daughters.

Elizabeth Joh -2 posts

Elizabeth Joh is a Professor of Law at UC Davis School of Law. Her scholarship focuses on criminal procedure and policing, with a special emphasis on the DNA collection, undercover policing, and new surveillance technologies. Before joining the Davis faculty in 2003, Professor Joh served as a law clerk to the Honorable Stephen Reinhardt of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. She received both her Ph.D. in Law and Society and J.D. from New York University, and her B.A. in literature from Yale University.

Hadar Aviram -5 posts

Hadar Aviram is a Professor of Law at UC Hastings College of the Law and the co-director of the Hastings Institute for Criminal Justice. Her research examines the criminal process and the correctional system through social science, empirical and experimental perspectives. She also studies social movements, particularly polyamory and other alternative family structures. She edits two criminal justice blogs, California Correctional Crisis (on prisons and corrections) and Iron in War (on policing and law enforcement), and is a frequent commentator on criminal justice matters in the media. Her book Cheap on Crime: Recession-Era Politics and the Transformation of American Punishment, which examines the impact of the financial crisis on the American correctional landscape, is forthcoming from UC Press.

Heather Thompson -1 post

Dr. Heather Ann Thompson is a native Detroiter and historian on faculty of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Her recent book, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy, has been profiled on television and radio programs across the country, it just won the Pulitzer Prize in History, the Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy, The Ridenhour Book Prize, the J. Willard Hurst Prize, and a book prize from the New York City Bar Association. The book was also named a finalist for the National Book Award, as well as a finalist for the Los Angeles Book Prize in History (winner announced April 21, 2017), a finalist for the Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association (winner announced May, 2017), and it was named on 14 Best Books of 2016 lists including those compiled by The New York Times, Newsweek, Kirkus Review, the Boston Globe, Publishers Weekly, Bloomberg, the Marshall Project, the Baltimore City Paper, Book Scroll, and the Christian Science Monitor. Additionally, Blood in the Water was named on the Best Human Rights Books of 2016 list, and received starred reviews from Library Journal, Kirkus, and Publishers Weekly. Blood in the Water has also been optioned by TriStar Pictures and will be adapted for film by acclaimed screenwriters Anna Waterhouse and Joe Schrapnel.

Imani Perry

Imani Perry is Professor in the Center for African American Studies, and Faculty Associate with the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University. Professor Perry is an interdisciplinary scholar who studies race and African American culture using the tools provided by various disciplines including: law, literary and cultural studies, music, and the social sciences. She has published numerous articles in the areas of law, cultural studies, and African American studies, many of which are available for download at: imaniperry.typepad.com. She also wrote the notes and introduction to the Barnes and Nobles Classics edition of the Narrative of Sojourner Truth. Professor Perry teaches interdisciplinary courses that train students to use multiple methodologies to investigate African American experience and culture.

Joachim Savelsberg

Joachim Savelsberg is a professor of sociology and law and holder of the Archam and Charlotte Ohanessian Chair at the University of Minnesota. After completing his education in his native Germany and after fellowships at Johns Hopkins and Harvard universities, he joined Minnesota in 1989. He has since been a visiting professor or fellow at the Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München, Karl Franzens Universität Graz, Humboldt Universität Berlin, the Rockefeller Bellagio Center and the Käte Hamburger Centre for Advanced Study “Law as Culture” in Bonn. His research trajectory covers a variety of topics, including comparative criminal punishment, sentencing and the field of criminology. Recent work addresses human rights issues, especially the effect of legal interventions on collective representations and memories of mass atrocities. Related books are entitled American Memories: Atrocities and the Law (with Ryan D. King; Russell Sage Foundation, 2011) and Crime and Human Rights: Criminology of Genocide and Atrocities (Sage, 2010). Recent National Science Foundation-funded research addressed “Collective Representations and Memories of Atrocities after Judicial Intervention: The Case of Darfur in International Comparison.” Based on this research, Savelsberg is currently completing a book, entitled Representing Mass Violence: Human Rights and the Struggle over Darfur in a Globalizing World.

Jon Gould

Jon Gould returns to American University in 2017 from his appointment as a Senior Policy Advisor in the U.S. Department of Justice. Previously, he was director of the Law and Social Sciences Program at the National Science Foundation. At American University, Gould is a professor in the School of Public Affairs and the Washington College of Law. He was inaugural director of the Washington Institute for Public Affairs Research, chair for the Department of Justice, Law and Criminology, and principal investigator for the Preventing Wrongful Convictions Project, a multi-year research initiative funded by the National Institute of Justice. Professor Gould is an internationally known expert on justice policy, social change, and government reform. An author of four books and over 50 articles, he has written on such diverse subjects as erroneous convictions, indigent defense, prosecutorial innovation, police behavior, hate speech, sexual harassment, and international human rights, among others. His first book, Speak No Evil: The Triumph of Hate Speech Regulation, was a co-winner of the 2006 Herbert Jacob award for the best book in law and society. His second book, The Innocence Commission: Preventing Wrongful Convictions and Restoring the Criminal Justice System, was named an Outstanding Academic Title by the American Library Association. Professor Gould has won awards for his teaching and service as well and is a regular contributor to The Hill newspaper.

Laura Beth Nielsen

Laura Beth Nielsen is a Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation as well as an Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Legal Studies at Northwestern University. She is a sociologist and lawyer with degrees from the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Nielsen’s research focuses on law’s capacity for social change. Her primary field is the sociology of law, with particular interests in legal consciousness (how ordinary people understand the law) and the relationship between law and inequalities of race, gender, and class. Her first monograph, License to Harass: Law, Hierarchy, and Offensive Public Speech, (Princeton University Press, 2004) studies racist and sexist street speech, targets’ reactions and responses to it, and attitudes about using law to deal with such speech.Professor Nielsen is an expert in the areas of sexual harassment in the workplace and beyond, employment civil rights of all sorts including pregnancy, pay, race, sex, national origin, and is a scholar of the legal profession.

Naomi Mezey

Naomi Mezey is a Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center since 1998 where she teaches civil procedure, legislation, jurisprudence, gender & sexuality, and seminars on law & popular culture and nationalism & cultural identity. Her interdisciplinary scholarship of law and culture focuses on racial, sexual, and gender identities, film and visuality, and cultural property. She has served on the Organizing Committee of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities and is a co-founder of the Columbia, USC, Georgetown & UCLA Law & Humanities Junior Scholars Workshop. Prior to law school, Naomi Mezey earned a Master’s degree in American Studies from the University of Minnesota. She received her J.D. from Stanford Law School, where she was an articles editor for the Stanford Law Review. Mezey served as a law clerk for Judge Marilyn Hall Patel of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California. She previously worked as a Legislative Aide to the late Senator Alan Cranston.

Renee Ann Cramer -2 posts

Renee Ann Cramer teaches in, and is the Chair of Drake University’s Department of Law, Politics, and Society – an interdisciplinary, undergraduate legal studies major. A political scientist by training, Renee earned her PhD in Politics from New York University in 2001, with a dissertation and book that focused on federal acknowledgement for American Indian tribes. Her second book, on celebrity pregnancy and our obsession with it, will be published in 2015. Renee is currently working on a third: on the legalization of homebirth midwifery practice. Professor Cramer teaches a wide range of courses, including Law and Social Change, Reproductive Law and Politics; Critical Race and Feminist Legal Theory; and Contemporary American Indian Law and Politics. When not teaching or writing, she enjoys hanging out with her husband and son, and their two dogs –training for triathlons, doing yoga, hiking, and going to see live music.

Valerie Hans

Valerie P. Hans is Professor of Law at Cornell Law School, where she teaches courses on law and social science, empirical legal studies, torts, and the contemporary American jury. She holds a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Toronto. She conducts empirical studies of law and courts, and is a leading international authority on citizen decision making in legal systems. She has carried out extensive research and lectured and written widely about juries, jury reform, and other law and social science issues. She is the author or editor of eight books and more than one hundred scholarly articles. She is the current President of the Law and Society Association.

Adele Humbert

Adèle Humbert is an investigative journalist based in Chicago. She recently graduated from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and also holds a master’s degree in law. She previously worked for Le Monde where she covered human rights issues and is a former radio reporter for the French national public radio in Paris. In 2012, she was a reporter in Beijing for Hikari Productions.

Alexander Kim

Alexander Kim is a journalist and radio producer based in Vancouver. He is a producer for Cited and an associate producer for CBC Radio. He has reported for CBC Aboriginal, Arctic Deeply, and Discourse Media. He is also the host and producer of Theoretically Speaking, a podcast about absurd science.

Alisa Roth -2 posts

Alisa Roth, Producer, is a radio and print reporter and has reported extensively from abroad, most recently in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. Her work has been broadcast on Marketplace, where she spent several years as a staff reporter, NPR, and The World. Her print work has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and Gastronomica. A Fulbright scholar, she has received grants from the International Reporting Project and the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting.

Amanda Aronczyk -1 post

Andrew Stelzer -1 post

Andrew Stelzer is an Oakland based producer working at Making Contact, and KQED Radio. He's reported for NPR, Marketplace, Living on Earth, Radio Netherlands, The Progressive, Latino USA, In These Times and many other publications. Find him at www.andrewstelzer.com.

Angela Caputo -1 post

Ann Heppermann -1 post

Ann Heppermann, Producer, is a Peabody award-winning reporter and producer. Her work has aired on numerous public radio shows including This American Life, 99% Invisible, Radiolab and many others. In 2010 Heppermann was named a Rosalynn Carter Mental Health Journalism Fellow, reporting on pre-teen eating disorders and perinatal depression. In 2011 she was named a United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow along with Kara Oehler honoring the decades-long work at creating innovative audio works. She teaches narrative radio journalism at Sarah Lawrence College and in NYU’s Literary Reportage program. She also produces Slate’s Culture Gabfest and DoubleX Gabfest.

Ann Marie Awad -1 post

Ann Marie Awad is a print-reporter-turned-radio-producer who originally hails from Buffalo, NY. She recieved her M.A. in Urban Reporting from CUNY Graduate School of Journalism in New York City in 2013. She now currently works as a reporter and local Morning Edition host at WRKF, the NPR member station in Baton Rouge, Lousiana’s capitol.

Ariel Ritchin -2 posts

Ariel Ritchin is a multimedia journalist based in New York City. His work has appeared on NBC Nightly News, PBS Newshour and WBAI. He is also the Web Editor for the Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma, where he directs and oversees all editorial content and leads strategic and digital initiatives for Dart Centre Europe, Dart Centre Asia Pacific and the Dart Center in the United States. He has previously worked in the multimedia department at the ACLU and as a video editor for Lucky Tiger Productions. Ariel is a Humanity in Action Senior Fellow and a Posse Foundation Scholar. He holds an M.S. from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and a B.A. from Middlebury College.

Ashley Cleek -15 posts

Ashley Cleek, Producer, is a radio reporter and producer living in Brooklyn, New York. Ashley has reported stories in Turkey, Ukraine, India, and Russia for American, German and British radio. Her stories have appeared on radio programs, The World and Marketplace and on websites such as PBS’s The Tehran Bureau, Global Post, and the Atlantic.

Audrey Quinn -2 posts

Audrey Quinn is a Brooklyn-based multimedia journalist. She specializes in health, tech and economy stories — in print, film, nonfiction comics, podcasts, and most commonly, public radio. Her investigative work has been awarded by the Fund for Investigative Journalism and The Nation Institute’s Investigative Fund and published in the New York Times. She is a teaching associate for the Transom Story Workshop and co-founder of the live radio performance event Radio Cabaret. Visit her website at www.AudreyQuinnaudio.com

Aviva DeKornfeld -2 posts

Aviva DeKornfeld is an undergraduate student at Pitzer College in Southern California where she studies sociology and gender studies. Her writing has been featured on the Feminist Wire and in the Daily Palette. She spends her free time thinking about intersectional feminism.

Ben Adair

Ben Adair, Editor, is a Peabody Award-winning journalist, entrepreneur and educator.

Brenda Salinas -2 posts

I’m Brenda Patricia Salinas Paéz. I’m a Mexicana-Tejana public radio producer who is passionate about incorporating social media into my reporting. I have worked as a producer for the Texas Standard, a daily news magazine show that broadcasts state-wide. I have also been an associate producer with NPR’s Latino USA, and I was awarded the highly competitive Kroc Fellowship at NPR in 2012. I have reported pieces for Morning Edition, All Things Considered, Weekend Edition, Weekends on All Things Considered and for KUHF Houston Public Radio. In college, I started my campus’ only student run foreign-language publication, Nuestras Voces. I have a B.A. in Economics from Columbia University. I’m a native speaker of Spanish and French was always my favorite class in school.

Brit Hanson -1 post

Annie Brown -2 posts

Casey Miner -2 posts

Casey Miner, Producer, is an independent reporter, editor, and audio producer based in Oakland, California. She edits and produces for the award-winning news, arts, and culture program Crosscurrents on KALW 91.7FM in San Francisco as well as Life of the Law; she's also contributed work to NPR, KQED, Marketplace, Mother Jones, and New Tech City.

Cheryl Brumley -1 post

Chloe Prasinos -1 post

Chloe Prasinos is a producer at Reply All. Before joining Gimlet, she worked on stories for Love + Radio, 99% Invisible, WBEZ’s Curious City, NPR, and State of the Re:Union. Chloe is alum of the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies.

Cyrus Farivar -1 post

Emily Gadek -1 post

Emma Jacobs -2 posts

Emma Jacobs is a multimedia journalist based in Paris. She’s a former NPR member-station reporter who also contributes to public radio programs Marketplace and PRI’s The World and whose writing has appeared in The Washington Post and The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Eric Molinsky -1 post

Gordon Katic

Gordon Katic is co-host of Cited. He has produced radio documentaries about the myth of the American "Superpredator," a fight over how to teach Canadian history, and the push for sex ed reform in Ontario. Gordon is taking a MA in journalism at the University of British Columbia.

Graham Gremore

Graham Gremore, LIVE LAW Producer is a writer and cartoonist born and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing, and he is the co-founder and co-director of StoryFarm, a literary arts non-profit in San Francisco. His cartoons have garnered over 125,000 views on Youtube and have been featured on websites including The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed. Visit Graham’s website www.grahamgremore.com.

Greg Eskridge -2 posts

Greg Eskridge is an award winning journalist with the San Quentin Prison Report and is a member of the Northern CA chapter of the Society of Professional Journalism - San Quentin satellite chapter. He writes and produces all of his stories, using a journalistic style that captivates radio audiences based on his personal experiences. His upbringing allows him to relate and understand a prisoner's situation and allows him to be the voice of the otherwise voiceless, while at the same time being objective in his reporting. Since coming to San Quentin in 2012, Greg has become a reporter featured on KALW public radio. Greg co-produced the Live Law, a storytelling event, on December 5, 2015, which was published by KQED. Greg recently co-produced and directed Artistic Rebirth, another live storytelling event co-hosted by CNN's W. Kamau Bell. In 2015 Greg headed the hospitality committee for the TEDx San Quentin event. After years of anti-social behavior, Greg was convicted of murder and received 65 years plus 2 life sentences. Since his incarceration Greg has applied himself in various self help programs which has helped him to comprehend the harm his crime has caused. One group in particular was "No More Tears," which brought him face to face with mothers of young men who have been murdered. This group opened his eyes to see the ripple-down effect that crime can cause. Greg says that when he looked into the eyes of a mother who lost her child it moved him to the point to where he knew he never wanted to cause harm to anyone. Pursuing a college degree has also been a cornerstone of his rehabilitation. Education has given Greg a sense of purpose and self worth. Greg continues to transform his life away from the destructive behavior he once participated in. He has developed an interest in mentoring youth in hopes of detouring them from the path to prison. When Greg sets out to do radio stories or produce live storytelling events, his goal is to give the incarcerated men a platform to express themselves, as well as give the public an accurate account of prison life, while dispelling many of the perpetuated myths seen on television. Prison life isn't glamorous, in fact it's the total opposite. Life in prison is actually the end result of negative behavior. Greg's message is clear that anyone can change before you get to prison. And if you do end up here, trust that change is inevitable. Greg has served over 21 years behind bars. You can contact Greg by writing him: Greg Eskridge # K07041; S.Q.S.P 3-N-42 L; San Quentin,Ca 94974

Hans Anderson -1 post

Hans Anderson is a reporter for WAMU’s Metro Connection and a production assistant at NPR. His reports have appeared on All Things Considered, Weekend Edition Sunday, and KCRW’sUnFictional. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland. His middle name is not Christian.

Jess Engebretson -4 posts

Jess Engebretson is a journalist from Virginia. A former staff producer at BackStory, she has also written and reported for Deutsche Welle, PRI, KQED, and Guernica. In 2009, she was awarded a Watson Fellowship to explore the uses of radio in post-conflict settings around the world; she later spent several years teaching radio in Liberia and South Sudan. Jess currently lives in New York City, where she is pursuing a PhD in English literature at Columbia University.

Jonathan Hirsch -16 posts

Jonathan I. Hirsch is an independent producer, reporter, and sound designer. His work as a producer has won The Green Eyeshade and Edward R. Murrow Awards. He has produced, reported, and sound designed stories for Outside Magazine, Life of the Law, KUOW, KCRW, KALW, NPR, and others. He is the host of the non-narrated audio documentary series ARRVLS -- a founding member of the independent storytelling collective The Heard. He lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Jude Joffe-Block -1 post

Julia Barton -1 post

Julie Sabatier -1 post

Kaitlin Prest -4 posts

Kaitlin Prest, Producer, is an all around documentary audio artist and Executive Producer of The Hearthttp://www.theheartradio.org/, a sex positive radio show and art collective. Every few months Kaitlin directs the “Radio Cabaret” at Union Docs in Brooklyn, a public radio performance event. Her work has been featured on NPR’s Snap Judgment, at In the Dark as part of the International Features Conference in London, on Radiophonic Creation Day in France and was the winner of the 2010 NCRA award for Outstanding Achievement in Documentary.

Kalila Holt -1 post

Kalila Holt is a radio producer and fiction writer from Chicago. She currently lives in Portland, Maine. She attended Oberlin College and the Salt Institute. Whenever Kalila Holt makes a salad, people say, “Wow, that salad looks great.” Find her website at www.kalilaholt.com.

Marylee Williams -2 posts

I’m Marylee Williams. If you listened to the latest episode of Life of the Law, you know I’m a radio reporter interested in legal journalism. Before I dive into how I found myself in upstate New York trailing the life of Homer Marciniak, here is a bit about me. I grew up in the South, splitting my time between Mississippi and Louisiana. My hometown, Natchez, Mississippi was right on the Mississippi river – I’m talking Huckleberry Finn right on the river. I left Natchez for boarding school at Louisiana School for Math, Science, and the Arts. I stumbled into radio journalism in college at my school’s station, KLSU. I also worked at the student newspaper, The Daily Reveille. Packing my VW Jetta to the brim, I left the South in my rearview mirror for Berkeley. “Going Federal,” was my thesis for UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, a two-year professional program with various media concentrations. I found this story at the end of my first year, and I was laughably clueless to the depth and complexity of this legal issue. It was around May 2016, and I was gearing up for an internship at KALW in San Francisco, finishing the last of my class projects when a nasty bit of insomnia took hold. I’ve never been great at sleeping, and it gets worse when I’m stressed. After two hours staring at the dark ceiling, I got up and absentmindedly went to the Internet. I ended up looking through the press releases from various FBI field offices. The Buffalo office had one about a comic book collector allegedly murdered for his collection. I was captivated: Comics, a supposed murder, and a man named Rico charged with Racketeering, which is also known as a RICO charge. When school started in August 2016, I knew this would be my thesis, but I didn’t know it would be about prosecutorial discretion. I hadn’t ever heard that term. I owe a lot to my editors, teachers, and peers for their endless support. I worked on this story in my Advanced Audio class with Snap Judgment executive producer Anna Sussman and help from the Investigative Reporting Program. UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism gave me a travel grant to cover my reporting costs for this story. I flew to upstate New York, rented a car, learned that batteries don’t work as well in the cold, and talked to everyone. Then when I got back, I started cataloguing and editing the audio, and about four months later, I had a thesis.

Medill Justice Project -4 posts

The Medill Justice Project, founded at Northwestern University in 1999, is an award-winning national investigative journalism center that examines potentially wrongful convictions, probes systemic criminal justice issues and conducts groundbreaking research. As journalists, we advocate only for the truth.

Michael May -2 posts

Michael May, Contributing Editor, got hooked on producing radio in 1998 when he went to Moscow in search of Oleg Lundstrem, the lone jazz musician that continued to perform during the Stalin years. Inspired by the experience, Michael quit his day job and declared himself a journalist. For more than a decade, he reported from Austin, where he investigated an idiosyncratic FBI informant named Brandon Darby, heard Willie Nelson sing “Amazing Grace” a capella and discovered that a police “bait car” can snare good Samaritans. His stories ended up on NPR, This American Life, Studio 360 and others. He’s currently the radio instructor at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in Portland Maine, and has also worked as the managing editor of the Texas Observer magazine, an editor at the national radio show Weekend America (APM), and as a news reporter at the Austin NPR station KUT-FM. For his radio work, May has won a Third Coast Audio Festival Gold Award and a National Headliners Grand Award. Michael now works at National Public Radio.

Nancy Mullane -42 posts

Nancy Mullane is a journalist, photographer and correspondent for This American Life, National Public Radio, Marketplace, Latino USA, and the NPR affiliates KALW News and KQED in San Francisco. In 2009, Mullane was awarded a Soros Justice Media Fellowship by the Open Society Foundations and in 2012 her first non-fiction book, Life After Murder: Five Men In Search of Redemption was published by PublicAffairs. In 2014, Penal Reform International in London presented Mullane with an award for her reporting on individuals serving death sentences. In 2013, Life After Murder was awarded the National Council on Crime and Delinquency’s, Media for a Just Society Book Award. In 2012 Nancy co-founded Life of the Law, and now works with scholars and journalists to produce and publish bi-monthly feature episodes. Mullane is on the Board of the Society for Professional Journalists, Northern California Chapter and is a member of the Association of Independents in Radio. In 2011, Nancy was the recipient of the National Edward R. Murrow Award for her report "Long Shot" on This American Life. In 2017, the Board of the Northern California Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists awarded Mullane the John Gothberg-Meritorious Service to SPJ Award, "Mullane was instrumental in coordinating print and broadcast journalists inside San Quentin to join SPJ and start a professional chapter at San Quentin that is affiliated with the Northern California chapter."

Oliver Arnoldi

Oliver Arnoldi is part of the documentary film program at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He formerly worked on the arts desk at the Telegraph in London and was a reporter at the Tibet Post in Dharamsala, India.

Peter Frick-Wright -1 post

Phillip Wilt

Phoebe Petrovic -6 posts

Phoebe Petrovic, Producer, is an aspiring radio reporter. Currently an undergraduate at Yale University, she studies English, writes for several newspapers and magazines, and edits a quarterly literary magazine. Along with Life of the Law, Phoebe interns with Cleveland’s NPR affiliate WCPN 90.3 ideastream and is currently producing an independent podcast called Second Story. In her career, she hopes to create audio pieces with Life of the Law’s characteristic blend of scholarly research, journalistic reporting, and storytelling into a single medium

Renee Gross -1 post

Renee Gross is a radio journalist and independent producer based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She often focuses on the feminist beat and cultural identities. A graduate of the University of Michigan, Renee has made theater with both male and female prisoners in Detroit penitentiaries based on their life stories and produced a documentary about creative arts workshops with incarcerated individuals. Her work has been featured on Michigan Radio and Sprudge: Coffee News and Culture. Her upcoming stories are slated to appear on Marketplace and NPR's Latino USA.

Sam Fenn -2 posts

Sam Fenn is co-host of the Cited podcast, a documentary radio program about research and higher education. He has produced radio documentaries about a Japanese American baseball player during the Second World War, the rise and fall of Vancouver's world-class drug policy, and a weekend festival for Christian teens. Sam has a MA in history from the University of British Columbia.

Sean Cole -2 posts

Shadeed Wallace-Stepter -2 posts

Shadeed Wallace-Stepter is a reporter with the San Quentin Prison Report, and is Chair of the San Quentin Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalism. He produces feature episodes inside San Quentin.

Shandukani Mulaudzi -2 posts

Shandukani Mulaudzi is a Digital Content Producer at City Press – A weekly newspaper in South Africa. She obtained her Master of Science at Columbia University in May 2016 and has a keen interest in Social Justice, Human Rights and storytelling through audio.

Shani Aviram

Shani Aviram, Producer, is a composer, sound designer and occasional radio producer. Her first write-up was in CatSynth, a blog devoted to cats and synthesizers. Shani holds a BA in music composition from Mills College where she studied with Chris Brown, Fred Frith, Roscoe Mitchell, Maggi Payne, Pauline Oliveros and piano performance with Matthew Goodheart. She has attended master classes with Alvin Lucier, Bob Ostertag, Christian Wolff, and Julia Wolfe.

Shannon Heffernan -3 posts

Shannon Heffernan, Life of the Law Co-Founder and Contributing Editor, is a producer for Chicago Public Media/WBEZ's in-depth reporting project Front and Center, where she has reported on everything from tribal fishing rights to the validity of GED testing. Prior to working at Chicago Public Media/WBEZ, Heffernan was awarded an Open Society Foundation Media Fellowship.

Simone Seiver

Simone Seiver, Post-Production Editor, is an undergraduate at Yale University pursuing simultaneous Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Political Science. She helps run the Yale Undergraduate Prison Project, through which she tutors inmates at a Connecticut prison as they pursue their GEDs. She conducts research with fellowship support from Yale Law School and the Institution for Policy and Social Studies. She is a native of the Bay Area.

Stephanie Hughes -1 post

Taylor Mullaney

Taylor Mullaney is a student at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law interested in the intersection of law, journalism and social justice. She has contributed to Chicago's Social Justice News Nexus and worked as a fellow at The Medill Justice Project, investigating a potentially wrongful conviction. As a former teacher, Taylor is especially committed to child welfare in all its forms. Taylor received her master's in journalism from Northwestern University and her B.A. in English and French from the College of William & Mary.

Travis Lupick

Travis Lupick is a staff reporter at The Georgia Straight newspaper and a freelance writer for outlets including the Toronto Star. Travis has written countless stories about Vancouver’s politics and social movements as they relate to mental health, addiction, and housing affordability. He has a particular interest in where those issues intersect. Travis is currently writing a book about drug policies and harm reduction for Arsenal Pulp Press.

Zach Hirsch

Zach Hirsch, Contributing Producer, is also a full-time reporter for North Country Public Radio, an NPR affiliate in Northern New York. As head of the station’s Plattsburgh news bureau, Zach covers local politics, the environment, and life in the rural villages along the U.S.-Canadian border. His work has been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, Weekend Edition, and other programs, and has garnered awards from the Associated Press, PRNDI, and the Public Radio Exchange.

Zoe Sullivan -2 posts