The Justice Department Under Biden
About the Event
What does the new composition of the DOJ mean for the pursuit of progressive policy? How will a DOJ led by Merrick Garland, Lisa Monaco, and Vanita Gupta impact enforcement decisions? What institutional, legal, and political limitations do actors within the DOJ face in their ability to shape enforcement? What limits should there be?
Join ACS for an expert panel moderated by Julie Fernandes, with panelists Roy Austin and Taryn Merkl, to tackle these questions and their implications for voting, hate crimes, racial justice, and other pressing civil rights issues.
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About the Speakers
Julie Fernandes is the Associate Director at Rockefeller Family Fund, which she joined in 2018. Prior to RFF, she served as the Open Society Foundation’s director for Voting Rights & Democracy. She also worked as a Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Civil Rights Division in the Obama administration and as Special Assistant for Domestic Policy to President Clinton. In addition, Julie served as the senior counsel and senior policy analyst at the Leadership Conference for Civil & Human Rights, one of the nation’s leading civil rights organizations.
Roy Austin is Facebook’s VP of Civil Rights and Deputy General Counsel, a role that is the first of its kind in the tech industry and one that is incredibly important for Facebook. Prior to joining Facebook, Roy was a partner with the law firm of Harris, Wiltshire & Grannis LLP where he primarily practiced criminal defense, civil, and civil rights litigation. He also has experience as: an Honors Trial Attorney with the Criminal Section of the Civil Rights Division where he investigated and prosecuted hate crime and police brutality cases around the country; Deputy Assistant Attorney General (DAAG), Civil Rights Division, U.S. Department of Justice where he supervised the Criminal Section, and the Special Litigation Section’s law enforcement (police departments, corrections and juvenile justice) portfolio; and as the White House Domestic Policy Council’s Deputy Assistant to the President for the Office of Urban Affairs, Justice and Opportunity where he co-authored a report on Big Data and Civil Rights, worked with the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, helped develop the Police Data Initiative, worked on the expansion of reentry assistance, and was a member of President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper Task Force.
Taryn Merkl is senior counsel in the Brennan Center’s Justice Program and its Law Enforcement Leaders to Reduce Crime & Incarceration initiative. Her work focuses on building a smarter, stronger, and fairer criminal justice system while reducing unnecessary incarceration and promoting public safety. Merkl previously served as an assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of New York for more than 16 years. She served as deputy chief of the Criminal Division and as chief of the Civil Rights and Organized Crime and Gangs sections. In Civil Rights, she supervised all human trafficking and criminal civil rights cases in the district. She also served in the Business and Securities Fraud section. In addition, Merkl served as a founding co-chair of the Brooklyn Human Trafficking Task Force from 2013 to 2019. She has received various awards and honors from, among others, the U.S. Department of Justice, the Women in Federal Law Enforcement Foundation, and the New York Law Journal. Merkl served as a law clerk to Chief Judge John M. Walker Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and to Judge Jan E. DuBois of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. She has also served as a lecturer at Columbia Law School and as an adjunct professor, specializing in white-collar crime, at Cardozo School of Law. Merkl holds a BA in political science and Russian with honors from the University of Michigan and a JD from Columbia Law School, where she was the editor in chief of the Columbia Human Rights Law Review and A Jailhouse Lawyer’s Manual (fifth edition).