Elise Boddie is a Henry Rutgers University Professor, Professor of Law and Judge Robert L. Carter Scholar at Rutgers University. She teaches courses on constitutional law, civil rights, and state and local government law. She has been published in numerous journals, including the Columbia Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review, the North Carolina Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law, and the Harvard Law Review Forum.
Previously, Boddie was the Director of Litigation at the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF). She oversaw its nationwide litigation program, including its advocacy in major U.S. Supreme Court and federal appellate cases involving voting rights, affirmative action, and fair housing. As Director of Education and an Associate Director of Litigation at LDF, she litigated affirmative action, employment, economic justice, and school desegregation cases in federal district courts and in federal courts of appeals.
Earlier in her career, Boddie litigated at Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson as a fellow. She also taught at New York and Fordham Law Schools.
Boddie is the founder and Executive Director of The Inclusion Project at Rutgers, a founding trustee of the New Jersey Coalition for Diverse and Inclusive Schools, and a board member of the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice. She served on the Rutgers-Newark Chancellor's Commission on Diversity and Transformation and on the steering committee of the National Coalition on School Diversity. She ran the Civil Rights & Racial Justice Policy Working Group in Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign. She was elected to The American Law Institute in 2017. She has been a guest on MSNBC, NBC Nightly News, Democracy Now and National Public Radio, among other television and radio programs.
Boddie received her J.D. cum laude and M.P.P. from Harvard and a B.A. in economics and political science cum laude from Yale. She clerked for the Hon. Robert L. Carter in the Southern District of New York.
Nicole G. Berner is General Counsel to the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), where she provides strategic legal advice to the union on a broad range of legal matters, including many of SEIU’s innovative organizing campaigns. She is also a partner at James & Hoffman, P.C. During her more than 20-year legal career, her practice has focused on the intersections of economic justice, racial justice, gender equality, and LGBTQ rights. In 2017, Berner was appointed to the ACS board of directors.
Prior to becoming SEIU’S General Counsel in 2017, Berner spent 11 years as in-house counsel at the union – first as Counsel to the Union’s healthcare division and later as Deputy General Counsel. She has represented SEIU and the Change to Win labor federation in a broad range of cases in state and federal courts, including helping to defend the Affordable Care Act, legal challenges to the Defense of Marriage Act and marriage discrimination, and a successful challenge to Pennsylvania’s onerous voter ID requirement. Prior to her work at SEIU, she served as a staff attorney at Planned Parenthood Federation of America, where she litigated reproductive rights cases and represented PPFA in state and federal efforts to protect and expand access to reproductive healthcare. Before that, Berner was a litigation associate at the Washington, D.C., office of Jenner & Block.
Berner also serves on the board of directors of the National Partnership for Women and Families.
Berner graduated Order of the Coif from Boalt Hall (U.C. Berkeley) School of Law, where she concurrently completed a master’s degree in public policy (MPP) from Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy. Berner served as a law clerk to the Hon. Betty Binns Fletcher on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and the Hon. Thelton E. Henderson on the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. She received her B.A. in Women’s Studies from U.C. Berkeley.
Christina Beeler is a Voting Rights Staff Attorney at Texas Civil Rights Project and ACS Next Generation Leader. From 2017 to 2019, Beeler served as a member of ACS’s Board of Directors.
Beeler’s legal experience includes service as a student attorney with the Texas Innocence Network, a legal intern with the Juvenile and Capital Advocacy Project, a research assistant at the University of Houston Law Center, a summer associate at Gardere Wynne Sewell LLP, a law clerk at the American Civil Liberties Union, a law clerk at the Texas Civil Rights Project, an Equal Justice Works AmeriCorps Legal Fellow with Lone Star Legal Aid. Beeler also served as the Assistant County Attorney at Harris County Attorney’s Office.
Before law school, Beeler taught high school English as a Teach for America Corps member in Houston, Texas. Beeler also worked as a singer-songwriter for nearly a decade. She released an EP and full-length album and was featured at several festivals, including South by Southwest and the Key West Songwriter’s Festival.
Beeler earned her B.S. in liberal studies with concentrations in English and sociology summa cum laude from Middle Tennessee State University. She also earned her J.D. from the University of Houston Law Center, where she ranked in the top 5% of her class.
