Board: Board of Advisors

Dawn L. Smalls is a partner at the law firm Jenner & Block, where she currently serves as the Monitor of a tier-one global financial institution. Smalls was previously a partner at Boies Schiller Flexner, and before that served as Director of Democratic Participation for the Ford Foundation, where she oversaw approximately $40 million of grantmaking focused on democracy initiatives in the U.S. Previous foundation experience also includes serving as a Program Officer at the Open Society Foundations. In 2015, Smalls was appointed to the ACS board of directors.

During the Obama Administration, Smalls served as Executive Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. She also served during the Clinton Administration as Assistant to White House Chief of Staff John Podesta and as a Special Assistant in the Office of Management and Budget.

During the 2008 campaign, she served as the New York State Political Director for the Obama for America campaign and a Regional Political Director for the Hillary Clinton for President campaign.

Smalls also served as a commissioner on the New York State Joint Commission on Public Ethics, the State agency tasked with ensuring that state elected officials and lobbyists comply with the State’s ethics and lobbying laws and regulations.

Smalls received a B.A. from Boston University and a J.D. from Stanford Law School.

 

Cliff Sloan is currently a Dean's Visiting Scholar at Georgetown University Law Center. Sloan has litigated cases at all levels of federal and state courts, including multiple U.S. Supreme Court arguments. In 2015, Sloan was appointed to the ACS board of directors and served as board chair from 2015 to 2017.

Sloan has served in high-ranking positions in all three branches of the federal government, including as Associate Counsel to the President, Special Envoy for Guantanamo Closure and Assistant to the Solicitor General. He also has served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit’s Advisory Committee on Procedures.

Sloan has held major media jobs, including publisher of Slate magazine and general counsel of Washington Post Newsweek Interactive. He is co-author of “The Great Decision, Marbury v. Madison.”

Sloan also currently serves as chair of the board of the Public Welfare Foundation and on the boards of the Southern Center for Human Rights, the National Security Archive, and the Criminal Justice Advisory Panel of the Arc.

Sloan’s appellate work has been recognized by The National Law Journal, and he has received the Frederick Douglass Human Rights Award from the Southern Center for Human Rights, the Light of Justice Award from the Texas Defender Service, and the Catalyst Award for Legal Advocate of the Year from The Arc.

Sloan received a J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School and a B.A. magna cum laude from Harvard College. He clerked for Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens.

Philippa Scarlett served as Deputy Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator and Senior Counselor for the Executive Office of the President during the Obama Administration. In that role, she developed and coordinated intellectual property enforcement policy across the federal government, including policy to support the creative and innovative industries such as the film, music, broadcasting, sports, publishing, tech, pharma, and fashion industries. In 2017, Scarlett was appointed to the ACS board of directors.

During her work with the Obama Administration, Scarlett also developed and coordinated policy to combat cyber-enabled trade secret theft, online commercial piracy, and the global trade in counterfeit products and related consumer protection and supply chain integrity challenges.

Before her service at the White House, Scarlett served as Deputy Associate Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice. As a member of DOJ's senior leadership team, her portfolio included management of policy as well as major civil and criminal enforcement matters of the Civil Rights Division; Antitrust Division; Access to Justice Office; and intellectual property matters from across the agency.

Previously, Scarlett was a partner at Kirkland & Ellis LLP. Her practice consisted of high-stakes litigation in trial and appellate courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, on a broad range of topics such as product liability, mass torts, constitutional law, antitrust and intellectual property. Her pro bono practice included litigating high-profile matters involving voting rights, affirmative action, and poverty law. She was featured by the National Law Journal as among the "Top Minority 40 Under 40 Attorneys" in the country for her work.

Scarlett clerked for Justice Stephen Breyer on the U.S. Supreme Court and for the Hon. Ann C. Williams on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Previously, she worked in DOJ’s Criminal Division, where she developed and managed U.S. rule of law and criminal justice assistance programs in Colombia, Ecuador, Rwanda, and South Africa.

She received her undergraduate degree from Stanford University, her master's from Harvard University, and her law degree from Columbia Law School. She also studied at the Free University of Berlin, Germany as a German Academic Exchange Award (DAAD) recipient.

Chris is Chief Counsel of Demand Justice, a new advocacy organization empowering citizens to organize around our nation’s courts and fighting for progressive change because the rights described in our Constitution are only made real through the power of citizen activism. He has been an ACS Board member since 2016.

Chris served in the Obama White House for nearly seven years—as Deputy Counsel and Deputy Assistant to the President; Senior Counsel to the President; and Special Assistant to the President for Legislative Affairs.

He oversaw the selection, vetting, and confirmation of more than 220 of the president’s judicial nominees—who set records for the most people of color, women, and openly gay and lesbian judges appointed by a president.

From 2014 to 2015, Chris also was in charge of advising President Obama on commutations and pardons, working with the Department of Justice to establish a new initiative that would lead to commutations for more than 1,700 federal prisoners serving unjust and disproportionate sentences for non-violent crimes (compared to fewer than 200 commutations in the preceding 40 years).

In the Office of Legislative Affairs, as an advocate for the administration before Congress, Chris helped spearhead the confirmations of Supreme Court Justices Sotomayor and Kagan, the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and passage of the Fair Sentencing Act, which reduced the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine offenses.

Chris also served as National Director of the National Council of Asian Pacific Americans and worked for U.S. Senate Democratic Whip Richard Durbin, of Illinois, as Director of Floor Operations, Judiciary Committee Counsel, and Counsel for labor issues.

The National Law Journal named Chris one of the top 40 minority lawyers in the nation under the age of 40 in 2011, and the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association gave him its President’s Award in 2012.

Reuben Guttman is a founding member of Guttman, Buschner & Brooks, PLLC where his practice involves complex litigation and class actions. The International Business Times has referred to him as “one of the world’s most prominent whistleblower attorneys,” citing “wins recouping billions of dollars for the federal and state governments.” The Boston Globe’s STAT News referred to him as the “The Lawyer Pharma Loves to Hate.” In July 2017, on the eve of trial, Guttman settled a case against Celgene for $280 million.

In 2013, Guttman was appointed to the ACS board of directors.

Among other clients, Guttman has represented workers, unions, and pension funds in complex litigation and for over a decade served as the chief outside counsel to the Oil, Chemical & Atomic Workers in a series of labor and environmental cases that enhanced safety and environmental conditions at Manhattan Project nuclear weapons sites while driving dread disease compensation legislation for nuclear weapons workers across the nation.

Guttman is an adjunct professor at Emory Law School and a senior fellow at Emory Law’s Center for Advocacy and Dispute Resolution and he is a founder and Senior Advisor to the Emory Corporate Governance and Accountability Review (ECGAR). He has taught trial advocacy and complex case investigations in the United States, China and Mexico, and he has co-authored three case files — two published by Emory and one published by the National Institute of Trial Advocacy — where he has been a faculty member.

Guttman has written or co-authored more than 100 articles or opinion pieces and multiple book chapters; his article, Pharmaceutical Regulation in the United States; a Confluence of Influences, was translated and published in Mandarin in the “Peking University Public Interest Law Journal.”

Guttman received his J.D. from Emory University and his B.A. in American history from University of Rochester. He is the founder of www.whistleblowerlaws.com. He began his legal career as a Washington, DC counsel for the Service Employees International Union, AFL-CIO where he served for five years.