On Thursday, March 24th, 2022 from 12:15 – 1:15 pm we held a virtual seminar with Sandra Park, Senior Staff Attorney in the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, moderated by Cornell’s Professor Elizabeth Brundige.

This talk, entitled Access to Justice for Survivors of Gender-Based Violence – Lessons from the United States, examined current legal barriers to justice for survivors of gender-based violence, including sexual assault and intimate partner violence, and assess national approaches and strategies for advancing survivors’ civil and human rights.

About Sandra Park

Sandra Park is a Senior Staff Attorney in the ACLU Women’s Rights Project.  At the ACLU, Sandra engages in litigation, policy advocacy, and public education at the federal, state, and local levels to advance gender equality and the rights of women and girls. Sandra has advocated for survivors of gender-based violence throughout her legal career. Much of her current work focuses on discrimination faced by victims of domestic violence and sexual assault in housing, law enforcement response, and schools. She leads the ACLU’s work on fair housing, including challenging the impact of evictions on women of color and housing discrimination against survivors of gender-based violence. Sandra is also responsible for the ACLU’s work strengthening patients’ genetic privacy rights and addressing the intersection of patent regulation and civil liberties. She represented twenty medical organizations, geneticists, and patients in a groundbreaking lawsuit challenging patents granted on two human genes related to breast and ovarian cancer, resulting in a unanimous 2013 U.S. Supreme Court ruling invalidating gene patents (Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics). 

Sandra currently serves as Board Chair of Girls for Gender Equity, a Board Member of the New York City Bar Association, and as an Advisory Board Member of the League of Women Voters of the City of New York. She received the 2021 Sharon L. Corbitt Award from the American Bar Association for her exceptional service and leadership to improving the legal response to domestic violence and sexual assault and was selected as a Movement Maker by Move to End Violence, a national initiative to build the social justice movement in the U.S. to end violence against girls and women.  Before joining the ACLU, she worked as a Skadden Fellow at the Legal Aid Society of New York and clerked for U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein of the Southern District of New York.  She is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College and NYU School of Law.

About Elizabeth Brundige

Elizabeth Brundige is a Clinical Professor of Law at Cornell Law School as well as the Assistant Dean for International Programs and Jack G. Clarke Executive Director of International and Comparative Legal Studies. She formerly served as the Executive Director of the Avon Global Center for Women and Justice. Professor Brundige founded and directs the Law School’s Global Gender Justice Clinic, in which students engage in local, global, and transnational efforts to address gender-based violence and discrimination.

Prior to joining Cornell Law School, Professor Brundige was the Robert. M. Cover - Allard K. Lowenstein Fellow in International Human Rights and a clinical lecturer in law at Yale Law School, where she co-taught the Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic. She was previously awarded the Robert L. Bernstein International Human Rights Fellowship to work with the International Association of Women Judges on programs designed to advance women’s human rights and access to justice in southern and East Africa. She was also an Associate Legal Officer in the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and a law clerk for Judge Kermit V. Lipez of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and Justice Sandile Ngcobo of the Constitutional Court of South Africa.