Expanding upon the success of Northeastern Law’s signature Women in the Law Conference, the Brown Forum, named in honor of Professor Emerita Judith Olans Brown, was established by Brown and her husband, Jim, in 2021 to support the advancement of women attorneys and students at Northeastern Law. The Brown Forum Practitioner-in-Residence program, launched in 2022, annually brings a nationally recognized woman attorney to Northeastern Law to share wisdom and insights about her field of law. The three-day visit includes class lectures, meetings with groups such as the school’s Women’s Law Caucus and related student organizations, and office hours to build personal connections with students, staff and faculty. Graduates are also invited to related activities.
November 12 to 15, 2025
Marielena Hincapié ’96, a nationally recognized leader and legal/political strategist in the social justice movement, has been named by Northeastern Law’s Judith Olans Brown Forum for Women in the Law (WIL) as its Practitioner-in-Residence for 2025–2026. Hincapié will visit the law school for three days, from November 12 to 15, 2025. While in residence at Northeastern, Hincapié will share her expertise and insights as a leading voice in the national immigration conversation and the need to safeguard democracy. Her visit will include class lectures, meetings with groups such as the Women’s Law Caucus, and office hours to build personal connections with students, graduates, staff and faculty.
Hincapié is a Distinguished Immigration Visiting Scholar at Cornell Law School and a 2024–2025 John W. Nixon ’53 Distinguished Policy Fellow at the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy. She was the executive director of the Los Angeles-based National Immigration Law Center (NILC) and the NILC Immigrant Justice Fund (IJF), where she served for over 22 years. Hincapié began her tenure at NILC in 2000 as a staff attorney leading the organization’s labor and employment program. During that time, she successfully litigated law reform and impact-litigation cases dealing with the intersection of immigration laws and employment/labor laws.
A seasoned strategist and bridge builder, Hincapié co-led the transformational Immigrant Movement Visioning Process, which resulted in a long-term vision grounded in racial, economic, and gender justice and equity. She co-chaired the Biden Campaign’s Unity Taskforce on Immigration and helped lead the national conversation on the essential role immigrants play in shaping the future of the US and safeguarding our democracy. She was key in supporting youth leaders in creating and successfully implementing Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), and co-founded the Protecting Immigrant Families Coalition.
As an immigrant from Colombia, Hincapié brings a bilingual and bicultural perspective to her work, advancing equity, justice and democracy. She is writing a forthcoming book, Becoming America: A Personal History of A Nation’s Immigration Wars, under contract with Flatiron Books, an imprint of Macmillan.
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November 13-25, 2024
Carrie Goldberg, founder of leading victims’ rights law firm C.A. Goldberg, was named by Northeastern Law’s Judith Olans Brown Forum for Women in the Law (WIL) as its Practitioner-in-Residence for 2024-2025. Goldberg will visit the law school for three days, from November 13 to 15, 2024. While in residence at Northeastern, Goldberg will shared her experiences fighting for survivors of sexual violence and representing victims of catastrophic injuries caused by tech giants.
Goldberg’s firm leads the nation in landmark cases challenging Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects internet platforms from lawsuits over content posted by their users. As lead counsel in Herrick v. Grindr, she introduced the novel legal approach of applying product liability law to dangerous tech products. In A.M. v. Omegle, the firm’s advocacy resulted in a new precedent in the realm of product liability and sex trafficking, the first case to overcome Section 230 where the plaintiff sued a platform for injuries caused by a malicious user. The firm also overcame Section 230 immunity in January 2024 against Snap for its role in fentanyl deaths in Neville, et al. v Snap and is appealing to the 9th Circuit in Doe v. Grindr relating to the foreseeable child rapes caused from the app marketing to children. Goldberg is lead counsel for 23 families suing Amazon for selling suicide kits to their children and has been an advocate around the country to regulate household sales of the chemical. Goldberg also serves on the plaintiff steering committee in multi-district litigation against Snap, Google, TikTok and Meta regarding the platforms designing products intended to addict children.
C.A. Goldberg’s clients include former Congresswoman Katie Hill and five Harvey Weinstein accusers, including Lucia Evans, whose accusations helped launch the #MeToo movement and resulted in Weinstein’s arrest. Some of the firm’s proudest successes, though, are the ones that stay out of the headlines: recoveries for adult survivors of child sexual abuse and restraining orders for A-list celebrities against their stalkers. In K.M. v. City of New York, C.A. Goldberg achieved the highest known recovery in a Title IX case in New York City.
Goldberg’s advocacy for victims of nonconsensual porn is featured in the documentary Netizens and her work is profiled in The New Yorker, Elle, Cosmo, Wired, Glamour and more. She is the author of Nobody’s Victim: Fighting Psychos, Stalkers, Pervs & Trolls, a 2019 New York Times Editor’s Choice. A fictionalized series about Goldberg and the firm is in development. Goldberg attended Vassar College and Brooklyn Law School.
November 14 - 16, 2023
The Honorable Anita Earls, associate justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, served as our practitioner-in-residence for 2023-2024. While in residence at Northeastern, Judge Earls focused on sharing her insights about voting rights.
Prior to joining the bench on January 1, 2019, Judge Earls was a civil rights attorney litigating voting rights, police misconduct and other civil rights cases for 30 years. Following her graduation from Yale Law School in 1988, Judge Earls was recruited by civil rights champion James Ferguson II to join North Carolina's first integrated law firm, Ferguson, Stein, Watt, Wallas, Adkins & Gresham, where she practiced civil rights litigation first as an associate and later as partner. She later founded and served as executive director of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, a nonprofit legal advocacy organization in Durham, North Carolina. Appointed by President Clinton, Judge Earls was a deputy assistant attorney general in the US Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, from 1998 to 2000. She has served on the North Carolina State Board of Elections, the North Carolina Equal Access to Justice Commission and currently co-chairs the Governor’s Task Force on Racial Equity in Criminal Justice. Judge Earls has taught as an adjunct professor at the University of North Carolina and University of Maryland law schools and in the Department of African & African American Studies at Duke University. Judge Earls lives in Durham with her husband Charles Walton. She has two grown sons and two grandchildren.
November 16 - 18, 2022
Brigitte Amiri ’99, deputy director at the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project and one of the nation’s leading litigators for reproductive freedom, visited the law school for three days in November 2022 as the Judith Olans Brown Forum for Women in the Law Practitioner-in- Residence for 2022. While at Northeastern, Amiri shared comments and insights about her high-profile cases, including successfully advocating for a pregnant teenage immigrant who was barred from accessing abortion services during the Trump administration and her efforts in the wake of the Dobbs decision, including a lawsuit in Kentucky seeking to block two abortion bans by asserting the Kentucky Constitution protects the right to privacy and bodily autonomy.
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Watch Video: Brigitte Amiri Speaks at Professor Jonathan Kahn’s Torts Class
March 9 - 11, 2022
Debra Katz, founding partner of Katz, Marshall & Banks and a nationally recognized civil rights and employment lawyer, visited campus in March 2022 as Northeastern Law's inaugural Brown Forum Practitioner-in-Residence.
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Katz is a founding partner of Katz, Marshall & Banks, where she concentrates her practice on employment discrimination, sexual harassment, whistleblower and Title IX matters. She has developed extensive litigation experience in federal and local courts and has achieved significant courtroom successes in a number of high-profile cases. She has been recognized as Civil Rights Lawyer of the Year for Washington, DC, by The Best Lawyers In America for 2018, as one of the “toughest” employment lawyers in Washington, DC, by Washingtonian magazine and as an expert in sexual harassment, employment and whistleblower law by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, TIME magazine and others.