Board: Board of Directors

Derek Ho is a partner at Kellogg, Hansen, Todd, Figel, & Frederick, PLLC. His litigation practice focuses on representing plaintiffs in high-stakes commercial cases. His litigation efforts have resulted in recovery of hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation to individuals and businesses nationwide. Among other awards and recognition, Mr. Ho has been named repeatedly by Lawdragon as a Leading Plaintiff Financial Lawyer.

Mr. Ho has an active appellate and Supreme Court practice. He has been counsel in numerous Supreme Court cases, including cases involving union dues (Janus v. AFSCME (2018)); the scope of liability under the False Claims Act (Universal Health Services v. United States ex rel. Escobar (2016)); and the standards for class certification (Tyson Foods, Inc. v. Bouaphakeo (2016) and Amgen, Inc. v. Connecticut Retirement Plans, (2013)).

Mr. Ho’s pro bono practice focuses on civil rights litigation. He has authored amicus briefs in numerous Supreme Court civil rights cases, including Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (defending race conscious admissions in higher education); United States v. Texas, (defending the Obama Administration’s “DAPA Memo” from challenge under the APA); Gloucester County School Bd. v. G.G. (defending the Obama Administration’s policies on transgender students’ rights); and Shelby County v. Holder (defending the constitutionality of § 5 of the Voting Rights Act).

Prior to joining Kellogg Hansen, Mr. Ho clerked for Chief Judge Michael Boudin, U.S. Court of Appeals, First Circuit, and Associate Justice David H. Souter, U.S. Supreme Court. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School and Harvard College.

He serves on the Board of Trustees of The Roxbury Latin School and on the Board of Directors of the Lawyers’ Committee on Civil Rights Under Law.

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Joyce White Vance is a Distinguished Professor of the Practice of Law.

She served as the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama from 2009 to 2017. She was nominated for that position by President Barack Obama in May of 2009 and unanimously confirmed by the Senate in August of 2009. Professor Vance served on the Attorney General’s Advisory Committee and was the Co-Chair of its Criminal Practice Subcommittee. As U.S. Attorney, she was responsible for overseeing all federal criminal investigations and prosecutions in north Alabama, including matters involving civil rights, national security, cybercrime, public corruption, health care and corporate fraud, violent crime and drug trafficking. She was also responsible for affirmative and defensive civil litigation on behalf of the government and for all federal criminal and civil appeals.

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Gabriella Barbosa is the proud daughter of immigrants and has experience as a teacher, lawyer, policymaker, and advocate, all aimed at centering and improving the outcomes of children from historically marginalized communities in Los Angeles and California. She is currently part of the Los Angeles office of the Ballmer Group, where she supports organizations and leaders in Los Angeles County committed to improving the economic mobility of children and families.

Most recently, she served as managing director of The Children’s Partnership, where she led the development, implementation and supervision of a multi-issue advocacy and policy agenda focused on advancing systemic changes that protect and promote the health and well-being of children from historically marginalized communities. Earlier in her career, she was a public interest attorney at Public Counsel, where she represented English Learner students and children in immigrant families; and a teacher at Los Angeles Unified School District, where she taught high school and adult school in Southeast Los Angeles and South Los Angeles.

She received a B.A. in International Relations and Human Rights from Columbia University and a law degree from Columbia Law School.

Roscoe Jones, Jr. is the 22^nd Dean of the Drake Law School in Des Moines, Iowa. He is the first Black Dean of the Law School and any college or school within Drake University.

Jones served as chair of the ACS Board of Directors from 2023-2025.

Previously, he was Partner and Co-Chair of the Public Policy Practice Group at Gibson Dunn & Crutcher LLP, where he helped clients navigate complex public policy matters and congressional investigations. His career also involved stints as chief of staff to a member of Congress, legislative director to Senator Dianne Feinstein, senior counsel to Senator Cory Booker, and senior counsel to Senator Patrick Leahy on the Senate Judiciary Committee. He served as special counsel to the Tom Perez, the then-Assistant Attorney General of Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Justice, appellate attorney in the Civil Rights Division, and assistant U.S. attorney in the Western District of Washington. He graduated from Stanford University and the University of Virginia Law School.

He clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit for Judge Carl E. Stewart and U.S. District Court of Maryland for Judge Alexander Williams, Jr. He teaches at the Yale Law School and University of Michigan Law School and previously taught at the Harvard Kennedy School, Georgetown University Law Center, George Washington University Law School, and University of Washington Law and Evans Schools. A Stennis Fellow, Wasserstein Fellow, and Murnaghan Fellow, he has been published in the ACS’s Harvard Law & Policy Review.

Alice O’Brien serves as General Counsel to the National Education Association which represents three million educators who serve in our nation's schools and institutions of higher education.  She has served in that role since March of 2010.  Prior to that, Alice served as the Chief Counsel to the California Teachers Association (from 2008-10) and as an associate and then member of the labor law firm of Bredhoff & Kaiser PLLC.(from 1995 until 2008).

During her tenure at NEA, Alice has expanded the scope and reach of NEA’s legal advocacy to include efforts to counter censorship, book bans and anti-LGBTQ initiatives and to support educators targeted for teaching in ways that reflect and affirm the experiences of all of their students.  NEA’s legal work also includes efforts to fix the nation’s student debt programs to provide meaningful student debt relief, to protect public education by enforcing state constitutional commitments to public education and to challenge state laws that roll back and undermine worker rights including the rights of workers to have a voice at work through a union.  NEA also has redoubled its efforts to ensure that the federal courts reflect the best of our country including lawyers who have decided their lives to representing working people and unions.

Alice earned her B.A. from Yale University and her J.D. from the Georgetown University Law Center.