Maya Arigala (George Washington University Law School ’23) has had a lifelong interest in civil rights and racial justice issues. Maya graduated from Reed College in 2020 with a B.A. in Comparative Literature, with a focus in Postcolonial Studies. She was inspired to attend law school after serving as a legal assistant for the King County Housing Justice Project, an eviction prevention clinic representing low-income tenants.

During law school, Maya served as a student attorney for the Jacob Burns Community Legal Clinics. In this role, Maya worked on ongoing employment discrimination litigation at the D.C. Office of Human Rights. She gained additional experience in labor and employment litigation as an intern with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights in Spring 2023, where she partnered with their Economic Justice Project to build reproductive justice advocacy into their existing civil rights divisions.

In her third year of law school, Maya founded the Reproductive Data Privacy Initiative, established under GW Law’s Ethical Tech Initiative. In collaboration with fellow students, faculty, and technologists at various nonprofits, Maya hosted a public roundtable on reproductive data privacy and drafted a public education guide with information for students on protecting reproductive data.

Mackenzie Darling (she/her) holds a B.A. in philosophy and a B.S. in public health from the University at Albany and a J.D. from Northeastern School of Law, with concentrations in health law and policy and poverty law and economic justice.

While in law school, Darling completed internships with Reproductive Equity Now, Pregnancy Justice (formally NAPW), and Women’s Law Project. She has also worked as a legal researcher at the Northeastern University School of Law’s Health in Justice Action Lab and as a research assistant at the Northeastern University School of Law Center for Health Policy and Law. As an undergrad student, she co-taught a course on intersectional feminism and worked as a sexual health peer educator. During her first year after law school, Darling was a Maeve McKean Women’s Law and Public Policy Fellow, where she worked with HIPS and the O’Neill Institute for National & Global Health Law on the campaigns to decriminalize sex work and drug possession in the District of Columbia.

Darling considers herself an intersectional feminist, harm reductionist, abolitionist, and a very passionate reproductive justice advocate.

Deepali Gill (Golden Gate University School of Law ’23) is a dedicated activist for racial, gender, reproductive, and economic justice. She is a Punjabi woman and the first in her family to graduate with a Bachelor’s degree and now a Doctorate. Deepali is a Californian and a central valley native who understands just how important it is for communities in these rural areas to have access to reproductive health care. 

Deepali has a wide variety of direct and indirect legal services experience working with various populations. After her first year of law school, she worked as an extern for an employment rights firm where she would often come across discrimination cases based on race, gender, pregnancy, and age. She then transitioned into an externship with the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office where she had the opportunity to work in the juvenile delinquency department and witnessed firsthand how the criminal justice system interacts with youth. The following summer she worked as a Gender, Sexuality, and Reproductive Justice legal intern with the ACLU of NorCal where she assisted with projects such as drafting know your rights guides, researching and drafting a portion of The Reproductive Health Behind Bars report, and analyzed various assembly and senate bills focused on ensuring that Californians have information to make decisions regarding intimate relationships free from discrimination. During her last year of law school, Deepali divided her time between two internships in the Fall and Spring semester. Throughout Fall semester she was a legal extern with Open Door Legal in their family law team and an intern with the Vera Institute of Justice where she worked in the Ending Girl’s Incarceration Team. At Open Door Legal she had direct experience with clients that ranged from conducting intakes, providing them with brief services on filing dissolution documents, and doing legal research as needed. Whereas at the Vera Institute of Justice she reviews and codes case files of young people that were detained while they were pregnant to understand the pathways that brought them into custody and how to disrupt these pathways and invest in non-carceral placement options. She is currently an extern with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area on their Economic Justice team. Here she is researching and drafting memorandums regarding the possibility of the first public bank in San Francisco and assists in providing direct legal services to small business owners while continuing her internship with the Vera Institute of Justice. 

In law school, Deepali continued to work in leadership roles where she could have an impact on diverse and marginalized groups. During her 1L year she was the 1L representative for the Women’s Law Association and Students for Sensible Drug Policy. In those roles, she built community by encouraging 1Ls to attend panels, events, or expungement clinics. These efforts helped mitigate the lack of connection caused by the pandemic and increased student’s access to mentorship and volunteer opportunities. She is now the Co-Chair of the Women’s Law Association, the Co-Chair and Co-Founder of the South Asian Law Student Association, and the Executive Vice President of Students for Sensible Drug Policy. She is also a staff writer on Golden Gate University’s Race, Gender, Sexuality and Social Justice Journal where she writes pieces that are focused on different policies and historical events that have left communities with intergenerational trauma. In her free time Deepali likes to cook traditional Punjabi meals, crochet, workout, and spend time with her loved ones.

Grabiela Dijali Hernandez attained her juris doctorate from Emory Law School in Atlanta, Georgia. Grabiela was raised in South Florida and began manifesting her passion for women’s rights in high school, through slam-poetry. She continues to write on her days off and is currently working on a poetry book centered around gender justice and a coming-of-age story. 

Upon graduating high school in 2016, with a little over a years’ worth of college credits, she moved to Miami to begin her studies at Florida International University. Within three years, Grabiela graduated with a bachelor’s degree in political science and a pre-law certificate. 

Grabiela graduated from Florida International University in 2019, and moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan – her hometown, to begin her post-graduate academic career at Western Michigan Cooley Law School. 

At Cooley, Grabiela presided over the Organization of Women Law Students, hosting events that discussed issues relating to women in the law and aimed to connect members with a broader professional support community. Grabiela received highest honors, and was awarded dean’s list Michaelmas 2020, and Trinity 2021 terms. Grabiela received her first Credit Merit award in criminal law in Michaelmas 2020, and her second in property law in Trinity 2021. 

August of 2021, Grabiela transferred to Emory Law and immersed herself in various professional learning experiences outside of the academic classroom. She was a member of the legislative policy and advocacy clinic where she observed and pushed for bills at the Georgia capitol related to juvenile justice and child welfare. Summer of 2022, Grabiela had the opportunity to intern with the honorable judge Rachel Krause from the Fulton County Superior Court where she observed trials and refined her research and writing skills. During Grabiela’s last year at Emory, she spent two semesters as a legal extern with Mosaic Georgia’s Children’s Sexual Assault and Advocacy Center where she had the opportunity to utilize the law and judicial system to help women, men, and children of marginalized communities in civil disputes stemming from a sexual assault. Throughout Grabiela’s academic career, she worked full-time in various positions such as a server, and front desk receptionist. Since moving to Atlanta, Grabiela has been bartending in a craft cocktail bar discovering a new passion for wine, beer, and spirits. 

Cassandra Pilla (CUNY School of Law, Class of 2023) has been working in human rights advocacy since 2013. 

Cassandra graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in international development from the University of Ottawa. As part of her undergraduate work, she interned for organizations providing services to individuals living with HIV in Botswana and South Africa.  After working for an international children’s rights organization, Cassandra completed her masters in gender, development, and globalization at the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2015. She then worked for Plan International as a project officer and later as a gender equality advisor. Cassandra contributed to and led human rights advocacy, mostly focused on reproductive health rights, as part of projects in several countries, including Senegal, Ghana, and Haiti. 

Given her exposure to human rights challenges through her professional postings, Cassandra chose to attend law school to further enhance her human rights advocacy skills. As a law student, Cassandra was an Executive Articles editor of the CUNY Law Review. As a student in the Human Rights and Gender Justice Clinic, Cassandra worked on criminal conviction vacatur for survivors of trafficking with The Legal Aid Society’s Exploitation Intervention Project. Cassandra was a legal intern at Her Justice, where she assisted survivors of gender-based violence seeking immigration relief. Cassandra also interned for the Centre for Reproductive Rights’ human rights team and contributed to their advocacy on maternal health and assisted reproduction. 

Cassandra is committed to and passionate about reproductive justice. As an If/When/How Reproductive Justice Fellow, Cassandra is most excited to begin her legal career contributing to reproductive justice advocacy. 

Rachel Utz graduated from the University of Louisville with a Bachelors of Science in communication in 2019 and then from the University’s Brandeis School of Law in 2023. She is from Northern Kentucky and has wanted to do civil rights law from a very young age. She began exploring more of the repro world while working at the ACLU-KY, the same summer that the Dobbs decision was released. 

During law school, Rachel worked as a resilience justice fellow, a fellowship aimed at addressing environmental racism in the community and identifying how best to remedy the issue. Being a resilience justice fellow allowed her to be a co-author on two publications, one of which has been selected by peer review as among the top 20 environmental law articles published in the US in its respective year. She taught Street Law courses at a historically Black high school in Louisville, teaching the students about their rights, what to do if they are pulled over, the right to privacy, and other basic constitutional law principles. She served as the Vice President for the Black Law Student Association and as the Community Engagement Chair with the Student Bar Association. She interned with the ACLU of Kentucky and helped research the possible criminality in a post-Roe world and how to navigate a state that had a trigger ban. She worked with the Kentucky Equal Justice Center to identify those affected by felony disenfranchisement, reaching out to over 300 Kencutkians, and encouraged them to apply to have their voting rights restored and then register to vote. 

In her own local community, Rachel helped to found the Boone County Community Remembrance Project which is working to identify the people that were lynched in the county and to bring a monument to the county to honor them, while also educating the community. 

In her very limited free time, Rachel enjoys taking care of her houseplants, crocheting, spending time with friends, or helping her mom at her flower farm. 

Prior to law school, Hirsha Venkataraman (CUNY School of Law ’23) spent almost a decade working in sales and account management within the financial sector helping small business owners nationwide reach their goals when large banks refused. Upon realizing that he wanted to use his relationship building and advocacy skills in an arena that would create more substantial change, he decided to attend CUNY School of Law, where he could learn how best to harness his strengths to practice law in the public interest. Hirsha is fiercely dedicated to making sure that reproductive rights are preserved, and that parents are protected both during and after their pregnancies. His goal is to ensure that everyone can make their own decisions related to pregnancy, have access to healthcare, and be economically secure.

Hirsha’s motivation stems from the stillbirth of his daughter, Thalia. Upon experiencing this tragedy, and seeing the numerous, unnecessary struggles his wife went through following their loss, Hirsha decided to dedicate his life to ensuring that other parents did not have to suffer the same experiences with stillbirth and paid leave. As part of the Health Justice Clinic at CUNY Law, Hirsha interned with A Better Balance, where he joined the fight for equal rights for pregnant and parenting workers. He helped in the mission to improve policies related to paid sick and family leave, reasonable accommodations, and pregnancy discrimination. Additionally, Hirsha volunteers with SHINE for Stillbirth and PUSH for Empowered Pregnancy to advocate for federal and state legislation providing paid leave following stillbirth, and for continued research into reducing preventable stillbirths. 

At CUNY Law, Hirsha was on the E-Board for Moot Court, where he competed in multiple external competitions and coordinated CUNY Law’s Annual Summer Competition. He was also a staff editor on the CUNY Law Review and member of the Public Interest Law Students Association (PILA), Formerly Incarcerated Law Students Association (FILSAA), Men of Color Collective (MOCC), and Phi Alpha Delta (PAD).

Hirsha graduated from Rutgers University – New Brunswick with a Bachelor of Arts in Economics. He is a proud son of Indian immigrants from the South Indian state of Karnataka. In his free time, he enjoys running, singing, and spending time with his newborn son, Raja, who is always looked after by his big sister.