The SALT Board of Governors Election will begin on Thursday, October 15^th through Wednesday, October 28th.   Only current SALT members can vote.  We urge lapsed members to renew so that you have the opportunity to vote.  The SALT Board, acting upon the recommendation of the Nominations Committee, has nominated ten outstanding candidates for positions on the Board for three-year terms that would commence in January 2010.  No additional candidates were nominated by the membership at large.  Therefore, the election is uncontested.  

The nominees include five new members – Elvia Arriola (Northern Illinois) who served previously on the SALT board, Michael Avery (Suffolk), Barbara Bernier (Florida A&M), Karla McKanders (Tennessee), and Hari Osofsky (Washington & Lee) – who were selected from among the many wonderful suggestions made by SALT members. Also up for reelection are five incumbent members of the Board: Pat Cain (Santa Clara), Ruben Garcia (California Western), Beth Lyon (Villanova), Denise Roy (William Mitchell), and Natsu Saito (Georgia State).

The SALT Board is very grateful that these wonderful colleagues have stepped forward to take on the responsibilities of leading our organization. All of them are already active on various SALT committees and have helped sustain many of our critical projects and campaigns. The candidate statements of the five nominees not yet serving on the Board appear below.

If you have questions about the process of the elections, please contact Hazel Weiser, Executive Director, at hweiser@saltlaw.org, or Tayyab Mahmud, Chair of the Nominations Committee, at mahmud@seattleu.edu.  Current members vote here.  New or expired members may join by visiting our membership page.  Instructions for voting were sent to current members and will be sent to new and renewed members upon joining.

SALT Board of Governors Candidate Statements

Elvia Arriola

Northern Illinois University School of Law

I want to return to the SALT Board of Governors because of the inspiration I receive from other law teachers who understand the need for the critical voice in the legal academy.  I can think of two major issues during my previous service where SALT played a major role in either being or supporting the voice of dissent in the academy over changes developing in the law and in public policy that threatened the core principles of equality and justice in an open society.  I was proud to be on the SALT Board during the organized response to the attacks on affirmative action, leading up to the organizing and education surrounding Grutter v. Bollinger, and during the movement to oppose the Solomon Amendment which threatened the cutoff of federal funds to universities who took a stance for equality on behalf of GLBT students.  I would also love to be involved more closely in teaching conferences again in order to be greeting and supporting the new generation of professors who need to know that if they have a commitment to social justice teaching, they are not alone in the academy.

Michael Avery

Suffolk University Law School

I am honored to be nominated to the SALT Board.  SALT is a critical institution in the struggle for social justice.  It is exciting that in recent years it has grown and become a more powerful resource, with an office and an Executive Director.  I look forward to an opportunity to contribute to that growth through participation on the Board.

The phenomenal development of the conservative legal movement and the extraordinary influence of the Federalist Society pose significant challenges for progressive scholars, law professors, students and lawyers.  The Federalist Society began as an effort to challenge what its members perceived as the hegemony of liberal thought in legal academia and the profession in general.  By the end of the presidency of George W. Bush, conservative lawyers dominated both the federal bench and the federal legal bureaucracy.  The Federalist Society has a student chapter at every accredited law school, over 40,000 members, and had income of over $12 million in 2008.  Conservative legal theories once considered “fringe” are now well accepted in U.S. Supreme Court decisions.

Progressives must engage both in a battle of ideas and in a competition to inspire the hearts and minds of the next generation of lawyers.  SALT is uniquely positioned to do both.  I hope my experience of having served as president of the National Lawyers Guild, teaching the last eleven years at Suffolk Law School, and now entering my fortieth year as a civil rights lawyer can be useful in this endeavor.

Barbara Bernier

Florida A&M University College of Law
I am honored to be nominated to the SALT Board of Governors.  The progressive voice of the organization is often reflected in my own writing and teaching and provides valuable guidance as new issues arise.  I have participated in many SALT programs, including the most recent Teaching Conference at Suffolk Law School and the Promoting Diversity in Law School Leadership Conference at Seattle University Law School.  

My Haitian background has driven some of my earlier scholarly interests and subsequently provided me with a range of wide, yet related opportunities that include: examining the plight of Haitian sugarcane plantation workers in the Dominican Republic, traveling to South Africa as an ABA delegate where I witnessed the aftermath of the fall of apartheid, representing an NGO at the U.N. Committee for Human Rights, and being honored with the status of Visiting Scholar at Harvard Divinity School where I studied law and women’s religion.

More recently, I have incorporated a political dimension into my research by examining the relationship of law and politics in the discussion of state sovereignty relative to the current marriage debate.  I am especially interested in serving on the Human Rights Committee and the Judicial/Governmental Nominations Committee.

My professional journey has offered the opportunity to affiliate with three nascent law schools where I acquired valuable institutional building skills and the accreditation process.  I believe my unique perspective and experience will be helpful to the continuing development of SALT.  

Karla McKanders

University of Tennessee College of Law

I am extremely honored to be nominated to serve on the SALT Board of Governors.  Since my entry into legal academia, I have marveled at the forward leadership amongst SALT members.  Since January 2009, I have served as a member of the Post-9/11 Human Rights Committee.  During this time, I co-authored with Raquel Aldana and Beth Lyon a report to the Obama administration with extensive recommendations for immigration agency reforms.

I am currently a professor at the University of Tennessee College of Law in the Advocacy Clinic.  My research areas focus on civil rights, immigration and asylum law and policy.  Prior to joining the University of Tennessee, I was a Reuschlein Clinical Teaching Fellow at Villanova University School of Law.  During the fellowship, I focused on guiding students in representing immigrants in asylum matters before the Department of Homeland Security and immigration courts.  In the spring of 2010, I will further my passion by teaching a refugee and asylum law seminar.

Entering into legal academia has permitted me to merge my passion for service through social justice issues, teaching law students, along with advocacy on behalf of immigrants and refugees.  Serving on the SALT Board of Governors will allow me to continue to serve in a greater capacity focusing on SALT’s goals of equality, diversity, and academic excellence.  It would be a pleasure to join the board of Governors and continue the committed work that SALT has accomplished for legal academia.

Hari Osofsky

Washington & Lee University School of Law

I am honored to be nominated to the SALT Board of Governors.  I became a professor with the goal of my teaching, writing, and advocacy helping to leave the world a little better than I found it.  Over the course of my seven years thus far in academia, I have deeply appreciated being part of a community law professors committed to advancing social justice goals inside the academy and beyond in the public policy realm.  I have benefitted greatly from the junior faculty workshops co-sponsored by SALT, as well as from the much-needed encouragement by SALT members that our collective efforts can help to bring greater social justice over time.  

My scholarship, teaching, and advocacy focus on climate change and on environmental justice.  My recent articles and current works-in-progress provide an interdisciplinary law and geography perspective on how climate policy efforts could be more effective, on the regulatory role of climate change litigation, and on strategies for environmental rights advocacy.  My environmental justice classes have helped to draft Earthjustice’s annual submission to the U.N. Human Rights commission, and my climate change litigation classes have worked with the Southern Environmental Law Center and the Western Environmental  Law Center on their climate change litigation strategy.  I also assisted with the Inuit’s petition to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights claiming that U.S. climate policy violated their rights.  Prior to entering academia, I worked as a Fellow at the Center for the Law in the Public Interest and served as a Yale-China Legal Education Fellow and Visiting Scholar at Sun Yat-sen University School of Law, where I taught U.S. Civil Rights Law and helped the school launch its clinical legal education program.  I received my B.A. and J.D. from Yale University.

If elected to the SALT Board, I would be interested in contributing to SALT’s ongoing efforts to promote diversity in legal education and academia and to support innovative approaches to social justice pedagogy.  I also would be excited about exploring additional avenues for bringing environmental justice concerns into SALT’s work.