NIU Law Professor Emerita Elvia Arriola joined a special edition of WGN’s Legal Face Off hosted by alumnus Rich Lenkov (”95) to commemorate Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Also on the panel was Justice Ginsburg’s former clerks Paul Schiff Berman and Rachel Wainer Apter and SCOTUS expert Carolyn Shapiro.
Professor Arriola is a graduate of UC Berkeley Boalt Hall School of Law and has a post grad Master’s from New York University in American history with a concentration on the history of women and racial minorities. She began her legal career as an ACLU attorney. She was an assistant attorney general in the New York State Civil Rights Bureau. Her scholarship was inspired by work as a litigator on federal sex discrimination cases and by volunteer public education on how the public’s fear of AIDS resulted in discrimination against GLBTs and people of color. Her first writings explored queer legal theory and intersectional feminist critical studies. Arriola’s law professor career began at UT Austin, and she joined NIU COL in 2001. She is professor emerita since 2016. Twenty years ago, Arriola co-founded Women on the Border (https://www.womenontheborder.org) which is committed to social justice education about working women in the global economy and since 2017 with human rights concerns surrounding the federal government’s anti-immigrant/asylum seeker policies and practices.
View the WGN Legal Face Off segment on Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.