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.