NESRI: National Economic & Social Rights Initiative

	BOARD OF DIRECTORS
	Martha Davis is the Chairperson of the Board for NESRI. She is a Professor at Northeastern School of Law, where she co-directs the law school’s Program on Human Rights and the Global Economy and teaches constitutional law, women’s rights, and professional responsibility. Prior to joining the Northeastern faculty, Professor Davis was the Vice President and Legal Director of the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund. A prolific writer, she is co-editor of Bringing Human Rights Home, a three-volume work on the U.S. human rights movement, and author of the prizewinning book, Brutal Need: Lawyers and the Welfare Rights Movement. Professor Davis has served as counsel in many cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, and she argued Nguyen v. INS, an equal protection case, before the Court. In recent years, Professor Davis has been active in the movement to use international human rights arguments to frame domestic litigation, serving as counsel on several amicus briefs addressing international human rights law before the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2003, she was awarded a Soros Reproductive Rights Fellowship to study local activists’ use of international human rights norms to address reproductive health and rights of low income women. Professor Davis holds a B.A. from Harvard University, an M.A. (Oxon.) from Oxford University, and a J.D. from the University of Chicago.
	Lisa Crooms is the Secretary of the Board and the Director of the LL.M. Graduate Studies at Howard Law School and teaches Contracts, Constitutional Law, and Gender and Law. She received her B.A. in Economics from Howard University in 1984 and her J.D. from the University of Michigan in 1991. A human rights activist since 1984, Professor Crooms has worked with the Washington Office on Africa and the American Committee on Africa. She is currently the vice chair of the Advisory Committee of the Women’s Rights Division of Human Rights Watch, for which she helped document state responses to domestic violence and rape in South Africa. She also serves on the advisory committees for the Georgetown Journal of Gender and Law, and BLACK FEMINISM (a Film Two Production). Professor Crooms has advised The Urban Justice Center’s Human Rights Project, UNIFEM’s paper on gender integration at the World Conference on Racism and the Women’s Institute for Leadership Development for Human Rights. In 1998, she received the United Nations Association of the National Capital Area’s Human Rights Community Award and delivered the Anna M. Hirsch Lecture on Women and the Law at the New England School of Law. Professor Crooms’ research and activist interests include identity and rights under international human rights law, economic justice, poverty and violence. Most recently, Crooms published The Violence of Gender and the Gender of Violence: Law, Gender and Violence in For the Common Good: A Critical Examination of Law and Social Control, The Mythical, Magical “Underclass”: Constructing Poverty in Race and Gender, Making the Public Private and the Private Public ( Gender, Race & Justice 101, 2001), and Intersectionality, Human Rights, and De-Marginalizing Black Women in Race, Ethnicity, Gender and Human Rights in the Americas: A New Paradigm for Activism 77 (Celina Romany ed. 2001). She both coordinated and contributed to the Symposium on the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination published in 1997 as 40:3 Howard Law Journal. In addition, she has participated in international human rights consultations in the United States, United Kingdom, Malaysia, Zimbabwe and South Africa. She has also conducted training workshops on a wide range of subjects including economic justice, gender bias in the workplace, intersectional identity in human rights law, and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. Finally, between 1998 and 2000, Professor Crooms was a founding member of the Black Radical Congress and served on the organization’s national coordinating and continuations committees.
	Patrick Mason is the Treasurer of the Board of NESRI. He is a Professor of Economics and Director, African-American Studies Program, Florida State University. His areas of interests include Labor Economics, Economics of Social Issues, Political Economy, and Development. His most recent research focuses on 1) the interactions between the race and ethnicity of police officers and the race and ethnicity of drivers with respect to both search rates and enforcement actions by the Florida Highway Patrol; 2) intergenerational mobility, family socioeconomic status, family values, and racial inequality; 3) the economics of identity; 4) the economics of discrimination and inequality; and, 5) culture, values, and inequality. He is also an associate editor of International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 2nd Edition (In-Progress) and co-editor of African Americans in the U.S. Economy (2006).
	Mimi Abramovitz is a professor of social policy at Hunter College School of Social Work and at the Social Welfare Doctoral Program, City University of New York. She received a B.A. in Sociology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and a M.S.W. and D.S.W. from Columbia University School of Social Work. She is the author of Under Attack and Fighting Back: Women and Welfare in the United States (named "Outstanding Book" on the subject of intolerance by the Myers Center For the Study of Human Rights), In Jeopardy: The Impact of Welfare Reform on Non-Profit Human Service Agencies in NYC, Learning From the History of the Poor and Working Class Women's Activism. She gave a speech entitled, "The Welfare State: A Battlefield for Human Rights" at the New York State Educators Association Annual Meeting in White Plains on November 17, 2006. Recent awards include being inducted into the Columbia University School of Social Work Hall of Fame, 2007, the 2006 Educator of the Year award by the New York City Chapter of NASW, the 2004 Distinguished Recent Contributions to Social Work Education, Council on Social Work Education, the 2004 Feminist Scholarship Award, Commission on the Role and Status of Women, Council on Social Work Education and the 1994 Award for Significant Contributions to Social Services and Political Activism given by the New York City Chapter of NASW.
	Carol Anderson is an associate professor of history at the University of Missouri and has recently completed a fellowship at Harvard University's Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History. Professor Anderson's research and teaching focus on public policy; particularly the ways that domestic and international policies intersect through the issues of race, justice and equality in the United States. She is the author of Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African-American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955, which was published by Cambridge University Press and awarded both the Gustavus Myers and Myrna Bernath Book Awards. In her forthcoming book, Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941-1960, Professor Anderson uncovers the long-hidden and important role of the nation's most powerful civil rights organization in the fight for the liberation of peoples of color in Africa and Asia. Her research has garnered substantial fellowships and grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, Ford Foundation, National Humanities Center, Harvard University, and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. Professor Anderson has also received numerous teaching awards, including the William T. Kemper Fellowship for Teaching Excellence, the Mizzou Class of ‘39 Outstanding Faculty Award, the Most Inspiring Professor Award from the Athletic Department, the Gold Chalk Award for Outstanding Graduate Teaching, and the Provost's Teaching Award for Outstanding Junior Faculty. Professor Anderson serves as a member of the U.S. State Department’s Historical Advisory Committee and is on the Board of Directors of the Harry S. Truman Library Institute. She is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Miami University, where she earned Bachelors and Masters degrees in Political Science, International Relations, and History. She earned her Ph.D. in history from The Ohio State University.
	Rhonda Copelon is a faculty member at CUNY Law School. She graduated from Yale Law School, clerked for United States District Court Judge Harold R. Tyler, and spent 12 years at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City, where she remains a board member and volunteer attorney. There she litigated civil rights and international human rights cases with a major focus on women's rights. These include the landmark Filartiga decision, which opened federal courts to international human rights claims, and United States Supreme Court cases, invalidating the firing of unwed mothers (Drew v. Andrews) and challenging the cut-off of medicaid funds for abortion (Harris v. McRae). In l992, she co-founded CUNY Law School's widely-acclaimed International Women's Human Rights Law Clinic (IWHR). IWHR enables students to participate in groundbreaking human rights litigation and advocacy in international and U.S. contexts with women's rights advocates from around the world. In addition to her work with NESRI and the Center for Constitutional Rights, she is an Advisory Board member of Human Rights Watch, Women's Rights Watch, and a founder of and Legal Advisor to the Women's Caucus for Gender Justice. She has published influential articles in the fields of reproductive and sexual rights and international women's human rights, and co-authored a leading text on women's rights. Her teaching also includes Law & Family Relations, Constitutional Law, Civil Rights, and Federal Jurisdiction.
	Paul Farmer, medical anthropologist and physician, is a founding director of Partners In Health, an international charity organization that provides direct health care services and undertakes research and advocacy activities on behalf of those who are sick and living in poverty. Dr. Farmer’s work draws primarily on active clinical practice (he is an attending physician in infectious diseases and chief of the Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) in Boston, and medical director of a charity hospital, the Clinique Bon Sauveur, in rural Haiti) and focuses on diseases that disproportionately afflict the poor. Along with his colleagues at BWH, in the Program in Infectious Disease and Social Change at Harvard Medical School, and in Haiti, Peru, and Russia, Dr. Farmer has pioneered novel, community-based treatment strategies for AIDS and tuberculosis (including multidrug-resistant tuberculosis). Dr. Farmer and his colleagues have successfully challenged the policymakers and critics who claim that quality health care is impossible to deliver in resource-poor settings. Dr. Farmer has written extensively about health and human rights, and about the role of social inequalities in the distribution and outcome of infectious diseases. He is the author of Pathologies of Power (University of California Press, 2003), Infections and Inequalities (University of California Press, 1998), The Uses of Haiti (Common Courage Press, 1994), and AIDS and Accusation (University of California Press, 1992). In addition, he is co-editor of Women, Poverty, and AIDS (Common Courage Press, 1996) and of The Global Impact of Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis (Harvard Medical School and Open Society Institute, 1999). Dr. Farmer is the recipient of the Duke University Humanitarian Award, the Margaret Mead Award from the American Anthropological Association, the American Medical Association’s Outstanding International Physician (Nathan Davis) Award, and the Heinz Humanitarian Award. In 1993, he was awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation “genius award” in recognition of his work. Dr. Farmer is the subject of Pulitzer Prizewinner Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World (Random House, 2003). Dr. Farmer received his Bachelor’s degree from Duke University and his M.D. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. He is the Presley Professor of Medical Anthropology in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
	Bruce Rabb, Counsel at Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel LLP in New York City. Mr. Rabb's practice focuses primarily on U.S. and international corporate and securities law. Mr. Rabb's other nonprofit affiliations are: Human Rights Watch, Director Emeritus & Secretary, FilmAid International, Director & Secretary, Citizens Union of New York City, Director Sabre Foundation-Humanitarian Aid for the Mind, Director, and, National Center for Law and Economic Justice, Director. He also joined the Supervisory Board of Agora, SA, a publicly traded company in Poland. Agora publishes Gazeta Wyborcza, the largest circulation quality newspaper in Poland.