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SUMMER 2020 HUMAN TRAFFICKING ACADEMY

INSTRUCTORS

The State of Labor Trafficking Domestically and Abroad:
A Critical Assessment on the 20th Anniversary of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act

Professor Dr. Catharine A. MacKinnon

Professor of Law, Harvard Law School
Cambridge, MA

Professor Dr. Catharine A. MacKinnon

Professor of Law, Harvard Law School
Cambridge, MA

Catharine A. MacKinnon is a teacher, scholar, writer, lawyer, and activist.

She is Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan and James Barr Ames Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School (since 2009). She holds a B.A. from Smith College, a J.D. from Yale Law School, and a Ph.D. in political science from Yale, specializing in equality issues, focusing on sex equality under international and domestic (including comparative, constitutional, and criminal) law and in political theory.

Professor MacKinnon pioneered the legal claim for sexual harassment and, with Andrea Dworkin, created ordinances recognizing pornography as a civil rights violation and proposed the Swedish model for abolishing prostitution. The Supreme Court of Canada has largely accepted her approaches to equality, pornography, and hate speech, which have been influential internationally as well. Representing Bosnian women survivors of Serbian genocidal sexual atrocities, she won with co-counsel a damage award of $745 million in August 2000 in Kadic v. Karadzic under the Alien Tort Act, establishing the first legal recognition of rape as an act of genocide.

Among the schools at which she has taught are Yale, Stanford, Minnesota, Chicago, Osgoode Hall (York University, Canada), Basel (Switzerland), Hebrew University (Jerusalem), University of Western Australia (Perth), Columbia, and NYU’s program in Shanghai. She was awarded residential fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study, Stanford, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and the University of Cambridge, UK.

Professor MacKinnon’s thirteen scholarly books include Sexual Harassment of Working Women (1979), Feminism Unmodified (1987), Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989), Only Words (1993), Women's Lives, Men's Laws (2005), Are Women Human? (2006), the casebook Sex Equality (2001/2007/2016), and Traite, Prostitution, Inegalité (2014). Her latest book, Butterfly Politics  (2017), proposes a theory of social change through law by strategic reflection on interventions spanning forty years. She is widely published in scholarly journals, the popular press, and many languages, of which she is competent in three in addition to English.

Professor MacKinnon practices law, consults nationally and internationally on legislation, litigation, and activism, and works regularly with the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW), and The ERA Coalition. Serving as the first Special Gender Adviser to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (The Hague) from 2008 to 2012, she helped implement her concept “gender crime” under international criminal law. In 2014, she was awarded the Ruth Bader Ginsburg Lifetime Achievement Award by the Women’s Section of the American Association of Law Schools, and is an elected member of the American Law Institute (ALI). She has served as High-level Expert to UN Women’ Executive Coordinator and Spokesperson on Sexual Harassment Purna Sen since July 2018.

Empirical studies document that Professor MacKinnon is among the most widely-cited legal scholars in the English language and over time the most widely-cited woman.

Special Session

The Intersections of Sex and Labor Trafficking

Prof. Dr. Roza Pati
Founder & Director
The John J. Brunetti Human Trafficking Academy
Professor of Law & Executive Director
LL.M./ J.S.D. Program in Intercultural Human Rights
St. Thomas University College of Law, Miami, FL
Member, Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, The Holy See
Prof. Dr. Roza Pati
Founder & Director
The John J. Brunetti Human Trafficking Academy
Professor of Law & Executive Director
LL.M./ J.S.D. Program in Intercultural Human Rights
St. Thomas University College of Law, Miami, FL
Member, Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, The Holy See

Prof. Dr. Roza Pati is a tenured Professor of Law at St. Thomas University College of Law, where she also co-directs the programs of Master of Laws and the Doctorate of the Science of Law in Intercultural Human Rights. Inspired by her work against human trafficking since the early 1990s, Dr. Pati founded in 2010 the John J. Brunetti Human Trafficking Academy, an institute she continues to direct.

Dr. Pati is a prolific scholar, who has written extensively in the field of international law, human rights, human trafficking and international criminal law. She is a globally published author of books, book chapters and law review articles in multiple languages and she lectures at academic, governmental and inter-governmental institutions around the world. She earned her Doctorate of the Science of Law degree, summa cum laude, at the University of Potsdam, Germany, her LL.M., summa cum laude, at St. Thomas University College of Law, and her B.A., highest honors, and LL.B., honors, at the University of Tirana, Albania.

Her areas of expertise include international law, human rights law, comparative law, human trafficking law, terrorism law, and she is a proponent of the New Haven School of Jurisprudence. Dr. Pati is Faculty Adviser of the Intercultural Human Rights Law Review and member of the Editorial Board of the international series: Studies in Intercultural Human Rights, published by BRILL/ Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.

Formerly a Member of Parliament and a Cabinet Member serving as the Secretary of State for Youth and Women of Albania, Dr. Pati has a wealth of experience in public service and academia. In 2012, Dr. Pati was appointed by Pope Benedict XVI to serve as Member of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace at the Vatican, and in 2020 she was appointed by the Holy Father Pope Francis to serve as Member of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, The Vatican.

The Honorable Suleman Masood
Council Member
United States Advisory Council on Human Trafficking
Fairfax, VA
The Honorable Suleman Masood
Council Member
United States Advisory Council on Human Trafficking
Fairfax, VA

Suleman Masood is a subject matter expert on domestic labor trafficking and male victimization. Since 2013, his advocacy experience allowed him to work exclusively with state and federal government agencies and non-profit organizations. Mr. Masood’s expertise includes collaborating with victim service providers and task forces on advocating for ways to improve the quality of services for trafficking survivors. This work emphasizes the need to build partnerships with survivors and to ensure that strategies and implementation are created with a survivor-informed approach. Mr. Masood’s partnerships with law enforcement includes serving as a program manager for the Alameda (California) County District Attorney’s office and working as a consultant for various prosecutors’ offices across the United States. In addition, Mr. Masood served on board positions for the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, 3Strands Global Foundation, and the National Survivor Network.

In 2017, Mr. Masood was selected to participate in the Human Trafficking Leadership Academy, a pilot leadership development fellowship under the HHS-Office on Trafficking in Persons and the National Human Trafficking Training and Technical Assistance Center. Mr. Masood’s cohort was tasked with creating a recommendations report and was credited with coining the phrase “survivor-informed,” which was adopted and published by the HHS-Administration for Children and Families.

On April 2020, President Donald J. Trump appointed Mr. Masood to serve on the United States Advisory Council on Human Trafficking for a term of two years.

Mr. Masood graduated magna cum laude with a degree in Criminology/Victimology from Fresno State University, and he is currently working to earn a J.D.

Martha Mendoza
Pulitzer Prize-Winning AP National Writer
Associated Press
San Jose, CA
Martha Mendoza
Pulitzer Prize-Winning AP National Writer
Associated Press
San Jose, CA

A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and 2019 finalist, Martha Mendoza’s reports have prompted Congressional hearings and new legislation, Pentagon investigations and White House responses. She was part of a team whose investigations into slavery in the seafood sector led to the freedom of more than 2,000 men. An earlier investigation revealed, with extensive documentation, a decades-old secret of how American soldiers killed hundreds of civilians during the Korean War. She’s collaborated on FRONTLINE/PBS to report on the detention of migrant children, and launched a 105 country Freedom of Information request that shows regimes using anti-terror laws to crack down on dissidents.

Mendoza has taught at Princeton University as a Ferris Visiting Professor, and UC Santa Cruz’s graduate Science Communications program, and guest lectured at numerous universities. She’s given commencement addresses, keynote speeches and is a frequent panelist for the Global Investigative Journalism Network.

During her Associated Press career, she’s been based in Mexico City, Bangkok, Silicon Valley, New York and New Mexico. Before joining AP she worked for the Santa Cruz Sentinel, the Madera Tribune and taught Kindergarten.

Mendoza is an advocate for accurate journalism, government transparency and the public’s right to know.

The Honorable Evelyn Chumbow
Survivor Activist & Advisor, The Human Trafficking Legal Center and Free The Slaves
Project Assistant, Baker McKenzie LLP
Washington, D.C.
The Honorable Evelyn Chumbow
Survivor Activist & Advisor, The Human Trafficking Legal Center and Free The Slaves
Project Assistant, Baker McKenzie LLP
Washington, D.C.

Evelyn Chumbow is a survivor of child labor trafficking turned anti-trafficking activist and public speaker who has focused her life’s work on ending modern day slavery, a crime impacting some 35M victims globally.

Ms. Chumbow was brought to the U.S. from Cameroon at the age of nine and forced to cook, clean, and care for her trafficker’s children. She was never paid for her work, and any hope that she might escape her miserable life was undermined by the constant beatings she received from her trafficker.

For seven years, she lived in constant fear, working day and night. She was prevented from contacting her family, attending school and enjoying things that many children take for granted – she never rode the school bus, went to prom, hung out with friends after school, or joined a dance team. Instead, she was a modern-day slave – not in some far-flung country, but right here in the U.S.

After years of captivity, she finally escaped and her trafficker was sentenced to 17 years in prison. Today, Ms. Chumbow works tirelessly to raise awareness and help other survivors. She serves as an advisor to human trafficking NGOs, and has been invited to brief government agencies about human trafficking from a survivor’s perspective, including the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI and the Department of Justice. She is invited regularly to speak around the world about her experience, including at the White House. She also serves as an advocate and mentor for fellow survivors.

In December 2015, fulfilling a life-long dream, Ms. Chumbow graduated with a B.S. in Homeland Security studies from the University of Maryland University College. She was appointed by the President of the United States to serve as United States Advisory Council on Human Trafficking to his administration. Since January 2015, she has worked at the law firm of Baker & McKenzie LLP in Washington, D.C., where she has the opportunity to support human trafficking and human rights related pro bono initiatives.

Ms. Chumbow has been featured in New York’s New Abolitionists, a book of portraits of women and men committed to ending human trafficking in New York and globally.  Ms. Chumbow was one of the coaches for the Partnership for Freedom’s first innovation challenge, Reimagine: Opportunity - a competition to improve the infrastructure of support for survivors of modern slavery; U.S. government agencies and private donors co-sponsored by Humanity United. Ms. Chumbow hopes to leverage her unique position as a former child slave to end human trafficking in West Africa, in her hometown, and the rest of the world.

Professor Kathleen C. Kim
Professor of Law
Loyola Law School
Los Angeles, CA
Professor Kathleen C. Kim
Professor of Law
Loyola Law School
Los Angeles, CA

Kathleen Kim is a Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Diversity and Inclusion at Loyola Law School, LMU in Los Angeles.  Her scholarship, teaching and legal advocacy focus on human trafficking and immigrants' rights.  Her writing appears in the UCLA Law Review, Iowa Law Review, and University of Chicago Law Forum, among others.  She is co-author of Human Trafficking Law and Policy, the leading casebook on human trafficking.  She helped to found the Loyola Immigrant Justice Clinic as faculty supervisor.  Previous to joining Loyola, Professor Kim launched the first legal services project in the nation representing the civil rights of immigrant trafficked workers.  She began the project as a Skadden Fellow and carried it forward as a staff attorney at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights.  She later became the inaugural Immigrants’ Rights Teaching Fellow at Stanford Law School.

Professor Kim served as a gubernatorial appointee to the first California Department of Justice Alliance to Combat Trafficking and Slavery and co-authored the California Trafficking Victims Protection Act.  As a Los Angeles Police Commissioner from 2013 to 2016, Professor Kim helped to enact departmental reforms that increased protection of Los Angeles' immigrant community and others vulnerable to violent crimes including human trafficking.  In 2014, Los Angeles Magazine named her one of Los Angeles' ten most inspiring women. In 2016, The National Jurist selected her as one of twenty law professor "Leaders in Diversity."  Professor Kim received her J.D. from Stanford Law School where she was a Judge Takasugi Public Interest Fellow and an editor for the Stanford Law Review.  She received her B.A. in philosophy with high distinction from the University of Michigan.

Susan French, Esq.
Human Trafficking Legal Consultant
Former Senior Special Counsel for Human Trafficking
U.S. Department of Justice
Winchester, VA
Susan French, Esq.
Human Trafficking Legal Consultant
Former Senior Special Counsel for Human Trafficking
U.S. Department of Justice
Winchester, VA

Susan French is a former federal human trafficking prosecutor with the Civil Rights Division, United States Department of Justice, who has successfully brought high impact and cutting edge labor trafficking cases. Among her cases are: United States v. Calimlim, a non-violent domestic servitude case involving a Filipina woman held in servitude for 19 years; United States v. Kil Soo Lee, a sweatshop involuntary servitude case involving over 200 victims from Vietnam and China who were subjected to food deprivation, non-payment of wages, and severe beatings - the largest victim class case ever prosecuted in the United States; United States v. Evans,  a violent labor case in which the defendant family, for more than 15 years, recruited homeless U.S. citizens to work in agricultural fields then paid them with crack cocaine and alcohol; and United States v. Nnaji, a domestic servitude case involving a Nigerian woman who was threatened, sexually abused, and paid a total of $300 USD for over eight years of exploitation and servitude.

In 2012, Ms. French left the DOJ to direct the Anti-Trafficking Project at the International Human Rights Clinic, George Washington University Law School. While there, she and a student team successfully brought a federal civil agricultural labor trafficking case on behalf of farmworkers. Since 2015, she has been a human trafficking attorney consultant and works both in the U.S. and internationally. She has presented and facilitated training and workshops in the United States and internationally on various human trafficking topics. She is a Freedom Network recipient of the Wellstone Award, an award that annually honors one person for her or his outstanding contribution to anti-trafficking in the United States.

Martina E. Vandenberg, Esq.
Founder & President
The Human Trafficking Legal Center
Washington, D.C.
Martina E. Vandenberg, Esq.
Founder & President
The Human Trafficking Legal Center
Washington, D.C.

Martina E. Vandenberg is the founder and president of The Human Trafficking Legal Center (HT Legal). Ms. Vandenberg established HT Legal (formerly HT Pro Bono) in 2012 with generous support from the Open Society Foundations (OSF) Fellowship Program.

Prior to becoming an OSF Fellow, Ms. Vandenberg served as a partner at Jenner & Block LLP, where she focused on complex commercial litigation and internal investigations under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. She served as a senior member of the firm’s Pro Bono Committee.

Ms. Vandenberg has spent two decades fighting human trafficking, forced labor, rape as a war crime, and violence against women. She has represented victims of human trafficking pro bono in immigration, criminal, and civil cases. She has testified before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law, the Helsinki Commission, the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and the House Armed Services Committee on an array of human rights issues. Through HT Legal, Vandenberg has trained more than 3,200 pro bono attorneys nationwide to handle human trafficking matters.

A former Human Rights Watch researcher, Ms. Vandenberg spearheaded investigations into human rights violations in the Russian Federation, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Uzbekistan, Kosovo, Israel, and Ukraine. She is the author of two Human Rights Watch reports, “Hopes Betrayed: Trafficking of Women and Girls to Post-Conflict Bosnia & Herzegovina for Forced Prostitution,” and “Kosovo: Rape as a Weapon of ‘Ethnic Cleansing.’”

As a researcher for the Israel Women’s Network, she investigated and published the first report documenting human trafficking into Israel. While living in the Russian Federation in the 1990s, she co-founded Syostri, one of Russia’s first rape crisis centers for women.

Ms. Vandenberg has received multiple awards for her leadership against human trafficking. In 2012, the Freedom Network USA presented Vandenberg with the Paul and Sheila Wellstone Award for her “outstanding leadership and dedication in working to combat human trafficking and slavery in the United States.” In 2013, she received the Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation’s Stevens Award for outstanding service in public interest law. T’ruah presented Ms. Vandenberg with the Raphael Lemkin Human Rights Award in 2014. She received the Katharine & George Alexander Law Prize the following year. Vandenberg also served as a co-chair of the International Bar Association’s Human Trafficking Task Force.

A Rhodes Scholar and Truman Scholar, Ms. Vandenberg has taught as an adjunct faculty member at the American University Washington College of Law and at the Oxford University Human Rights Summer Program. She is admitted to practice in New York and the District of Columbia.

Dr. Elizabeth K. Hopper
Director, Project REACH
The Trauma Center at Justice Resource Institute
Brookline, MA
Dr. Elizabeth K. Hopper
Director, Project REACH
The Trauma Center at Justice Resource Institute
Brookline, MA

Elizabeth Hopper is a licensed clinical psychologist with a specialization in traumatic stress. She completed a Master of Science degree and Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology at St. Louis University, an internship at the Medical College of Virginia, and a postdoctoral fellowship at the Trauma Center in Boston. Dr. Hopper is an administrator, supervisor, clinician, and member of the Training Faculty at the Trauma Center at Justice Resource Institute, a leading agency in the study and treatment of the psychological impact of exposure to trauma. She is the Project Director of the Metropolitan Boston Complex Trauma Treatment Initiative (MB-CTTI), a mobile service network delivering evidence-based trauma interventions to high-risk and underserved complex trauma-exposed children and youth ages 0-21 living in the Metropolitan Boston region. As part of her anti-trafficking work, she is the Director of Project REACH, a program that serves victims of human trafficking throughout the United States; Director of the New England Coalition Against Trafficking, a regional network of anti-trafficking professionals; and Co-Chair of the Mental Health Council for HEAL Trafficking, a national network of health and public health professionals.

Dr. Hopper is the co-author of two books that address body-oriented intervention, including Treating Adult Survivors of Childhood Emotional Abuse and Neglect: Component-Based Psychotherapy, which presents a complex trauma treatment framework for adults, and Overcoming Trauma Through Yoga: Reclaiming Your Body, a book that introduces yoga as a body-based intervention for trauma. She has written numerous scholarly articles and book chapters on complex trauma, trauma-informed care, homelessness, and human trafficking and is on the editorial review boards of several professional journals. She has a strong interest in integration across treatment models and in interventions that can be individually adapted. She has collaborated with numerous agencies and organizations in developing trauma-informed care systems.

Professor Dr. Mohamed Y. Mattar
United Nations Senior Expert in Criminal Justice & Clinical Professor of Law
Qatar University College of Law
Doha, Qatar
Professor Dr. Mohamed Y. Mattar
United Nations Senior Expert in Criminal Justice & Clinical Professor of Law
Qatar University College of Law
Doha, Qatar

Dr. Mattar is a Clinical Professor of Law and the Director of the Law Clinic at Qatar University College of Law. Dr. Mattar’s professional expertise is in comparative and international law.  Recognized as an international expert on anti-trafficking legislation, Dr. Mattar has worked over 15 years in more than 75 countries, including countries in the Middle East, to promote state compliance with international human rights standards and to advise governments on drafting, and enforcing human rights laws. Dr. Mattar has testified in the United States on the status of human trafficking around the world at various Congressional Hearings. He also testified before the Russian Duma, the Mexican Senate, the Inter-American Human Rights Commission and the Egyptian Parliament.

He was the Executive Director of The Protection Project of the Foreign Policy Institute at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, D.C., from 2005 to 2014. In this role, he directed and supervised seven areas: Trafficking in Persons; Clinical Legal Education; Corporate Social Responsibility; Legal Reform; Promotion of Religious Dialogue; Enhancing Capacity of Civil Society; and Human Rights Education. He monitored, analyzed and reported on violations of human rights, conducted training and capacity building programs for NGOs, government officials and service providers, while working towards universal implementation of human rights.

He has taught at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C., and Indiana University School of Law in Indianapolis. Dr. Mattar teaches courses on International Trafficking in Persons; Labor Law; Corporate Social Responsibility; International Contract Law; Investment and Trade Laws of the Middle East; Islamic Law; Introduction to the American Legal System; International Business and Human Rights; and Legal Ethics. His latest publications include Medical Liability for Trafficking in Persons for the Purpose of Human Experimentation: International Standards and Comparative Models from Arab Jurisdictions, International Annals of Criminology 2017.

Dr. Mattar is a consultant at The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), where he advises on International and National Laws on Combating Trafficking in Persons, Legislative Drafting, Drafting of Strategies and Action Plans, Legal Aid, and Middle East Legal Systems.

Dr. Mattar received his Doctorate of Juridical Sciences (S.J.D.) and Master of Laws (LL.M) from Tulane University, his Master of Comparative Law (M.C.L.) from the University of Miami, and his License en Droit (LL.B.) from Alexandria University where he still serves as a non-resident distinguished professor of law.

Barbara A. Martinez, Esq.
Partner, Holland & Knight LLP
Former Chief of Special Prosecutions Section
U.S. Attorney’s Office, SDFL
Miami, FL
Barbara A. Martinez, Esq.
Partner, Holland & Knight LLP
Former Chief of Special Prosecutions Section
U.S. Attorney’s Office, SDFL
Miami, FL

Barbara A. Martinez is a member of Holland & Knight’s Global Compliance and Investigation Team in the firm’s Miami office.  After a distinguished career handling an array of significant matters as a federal prosecutor, she focuses her practice on internal corporate investigations, corporate compliance and training, and white collar criminal defense.

Prior to joining Holland & Knight, Ms. Martinez served as the Chief of the Special Prosecutions Section at the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida in Miami. In this capacity, she supervised federal prosecutors who handled cases involving international and domestic human trafficking, money laundering, child exploitation, extortion, international kidnappings, and other transnational crimes.  Ms. Martinez was also the Human Trafficking Coordinator and the Project Safe Childhood Coordinator for the Southern District of Florida for more than a decade. As the Coordinator for these programs, Ms. Martinez spearheaded coordination efforts between law enforcement, non-governmental organizations, and prosecutors nationwide and globally to more effectively prevent and identify human trafficking and child exploitation, as well as to investigate and successfully prosecute cases.  She also routinely collaborated with foreign governments, private industries, non-governmental organizations, and community members to assist in these efforts and raise public awareness.

Ms. Martinez also previously worked as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Economic Crimes Section and a Department of Justice (DOJ) Trial Attorney for the Fraud Section of the Criminal Division in Washington, D.C.  In these roles, Ms. Martinez prosecuted complex white collar cases involving health care fraud, bank fraud, mail and wire fraud, telemarketing fraud, identity theft and credit card fraud, computer intrusion, false statements, and obstruction of justice.

Ms. Martinez has tried more than 20 jury trial cases in federal court and more than 30 bench trials in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. Some of her notable federal trials include:

a six-week international sex trafficking case;
a month-long sex trafficking case involving 50 adult victims from across the United States;
a two-week multimillion-dollar health care fraud case against the owner of a medical clinic;
a three-week multimillion-dollar health care fraud case against two physicians; and
a nine-day multimillion-dollar Department of Education fraud case against the owners of a vocational school.

Ms. Martinez also has extensive experience teaching and conducting training courses.  She conducted and created anti-trafficking and money laundering training sessions for law enforcement, prosecutors, victim advocates, and members of the financial industry throughout the United States and in foreign countries including Mexico, The Bahamas, St. Lucia, Barbados, Portugal, Latvia, Poland, Bulgaria, and Iceland. She taught trial advocacy to law enforcement and prosecutors in Chile and a session about computer crimes to representatives of financial institutions in Peru. In addition, Ms. Martinez teaches a human trafficking seminar at the University of Miami School of Law.

Ms. Martinez joined the DOJ in 1997 as a trial attorney through the Attorney General's Honors Program. She worked for the fraud section in the criminal division from 1997 until 2000, when she joined the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Florida.

Ms. Martinez is the recipient of numerous honors and awards including:  Attorney General's Award for Distinguished Service, DOJ, 2018; Women of Distinction Award, Dade County Bar Association Government Committee, 2018; Wasserstein Public Interest Fellow, Harvard Law School, 2016-2017; Director's Award for Superior Performance, DOJ, 2015 and 2005; Top Prosecutor Award, Women in Federal Law Enforcement, 2013; Prosecutor Hero Award, Shared Hope International, 2013; Outstanding Partnership Coalition Group Award, DOJ, 2011; 40 Under 40 Outstanding Lawyers, Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, 2011; Director’s Honor Award, U.S. Secret Service, 2010; Meritorious Public Service Award, U.S. Coast Guard, 2007; and the Group Achievement Award, Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, 2004.

Dr. Hilary Chester
Associate Director of Anti-Trafficking Programs
Migration and Refugee Services
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops
Washington, D.C.
Dr. Hilary Chester
Associate Director of Anti-Trafficking Programs
Migration and Refugee Services
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops
Washington, D.C.

Dr. Hilary Chester directs the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops Anti-Trafficking Program.  The Anti-Trafficking Program has several initiatives, including a national education and awareness raising campaign directed to immigrant communities; a program of specialized employment and job readiness services to U.S. citizen and foreign-national trafficking survivors; a global coalition to address human trafficking in the fishing and maritime industries and the ongoing development and delivery of training curricula, evaluations and quality improvement planning for service delivery and outreach programs; research and advocacy.

Dr. Chester has over 12 years of experience working with vulnerable migrants, including unaccompanied children, victims of human trafficking and refugees; program management, social science research and evaluation. She provides expert consultations on child trafficking cases to the U.S. government and is frequently invited to participate in multi-disciplinary working groups on human trafficking, especially at the intersections of trafficking and migration and the application of new technologies and use of data. She received her doctorate in Anthropology from Southern Methodist University.

Professor Nora V. Demleitner
Professor of Law
Washington and Lee University School of Law
Lexington, VA
Professor Nora V. Demleitner
Professor of Law
Washington and Lee University School of Law
Lexington, VA

Nora Demleitner received her J.D. from Yale Law School, her B.A. from Bates College, and an LL.M. with distinction in International and Comparative Law from Georgetown University Law Center. After law school Professor Demleitner clerked for the Hon. Samuel A. Alito, Jr., then a member of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. She testified in front of the U.S. Senate on behalf of Justice Alito's nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Professor Demleitner teaches and has written widely in the areas of criminal, comparative, and immigration law. Her special expertise is in sentencing and collateral sentencing consequences. At conferences around the country she regularly speaks on sentencing matters, often in a comparative context, and on issues pertaining to the state of legal education.

Professor Demleitner has also lectured widely in Europe. She has served as a visiting professor at the University of Michigan Law School, the University of Freiburg, Germany, St. Thomas University School of Law in Miami, and the Sant' Anna Institute of Advanced Research in Pisa, Italy. In addition, she has been a visiting researcher at the Max-Planck-Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law in Germany, funded by a German Academic Exchange Service grant.

Professor Demleitner is an editor of the Federal Sentencing Reporter, and serves on the executive editorial board of the American Journal of Comparative Law. She is the lead author of Sentencing Law and Policy, a major casebook on sentencing law, published by Aspen Law & Business. Her articles have appeared in the Stanford, Michigan, and Minnesota law reviews, among others.

Professor Demleitner is an elected member of the American Law Institute and the International Society of Comparative Law and a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation.

Alicia Priovolos, Esq.
Director, Human Trafficking Unit
Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office
Miami, FL
Alicia Priovolos, Esq.
Director, Human Trafficking Unit
Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office
Miami, FL

Alicia Priovolos is the Director of the Human Trafficking Unit at the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office.  She has held this position since June of 2018.  As the Director, Mrs. Priovolos supervises all the human trafficking prosecutions in the office and leads a task force which investigates human trafficking throughout the county.  She also collaborates with state and federal law enforcement agencies with proactive investigations, advocates for changes in legislation, and trains officers, fire rescue personnel, code enforcement officers, and other state and local professionals about human trafficking identification and investigations.

Mrs. Priovolos has served as a guest speaker at many community outreach events aimed to raise public awareness about human trafficking.  Most notably, in 2020 the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office led a community initiative to combat sex trafficking during Super Bowl LIV.  Through collaborative efforts twenty victims of human trafficking were recovered, and a major community awareness campaign was executed throughout three counties.  Mrs. Priovolos led much of the collaboration between the Super Bowl Host Committee, the Women’s Fund, and the numerous state and federal law enforcement agencies that accomplished this undertaking.

Mrs. Priovolos started her career at the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office in 2005 after obtaining her law degree from Florida International University.  Throughout her fourteen-plus years at the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office, Mrs. Priovolos has prosecuted hundreds of cases.  Her focus has primarily been prosecuting violent crimes.  Prior to becoming the Director of the Human Trafficking Unit, Mrs. Priovolos prosecuted some of the first human trafficking cases the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office encountered.  During her tenure at the office, she was also responsible for prosecuting homicides, sexual batteries, organized crime, and armed robberies.

Liza E. Smoker, Esq.
Managing Director
The John J. Brunetti Human Trafficking Academy
St. Thomas University School of Law
Miami, FL
Liza E. Smoker, Esq.
Managing Director
The John J. Brunetti Human Trafficking Academy
St. Thomas University School of Law
Miami, FL

Liza E. Smoker is Managing Director of The John J. Brunetti Human Trafficking Academy at St. Thomas University School of Law, which develops education programs, conducts research, and instructs law and policy to fight human trafficking throughout the world and empower survivor leadership in our global community.

Prior to joining the Academy, she spent ten years in the private practice of law where she became the first woman partner in her firm’s 90-year history.  She was formally educated on human trafficking matters at St. Thomas University School of Law’s LL.M./J.S.D. Program in Intercultural Human Rights, and served as LL.M. Editor-in-Chief of the Intercultural Human Rights Law Review.

Ms. Smoker worked in the Executive Office of the Governor of Florida, prosecuted crimes as a CLI in the State Attorney’s Office, and served as a White House Legal Intern in the Office of the Counsel to the President of the United States.

In 2017, Ms. Smoker spearheaded over twenty events focused on the harmful effects of pornography and its link to commercial sexual exploitation as one of the prevalent forms of human trafficking.  She led a grassroots campaign in support of Florida HR 157 on the issue that passed in 2018 with bipartisan support.

In 2019, Ms. Smoker was one of 60 Scholars chosen nationwide as a Presidential Leadership Scholar (PLS).  The PLS Program is a partnership among the Presidential Centers of George W. Bush, William J. Clinton, George H.W. Bush, and Lyndon B. Johnson, and designed for mid-career leaders from diverse backgrounds who share a commitment to helping solve society’s greatest challenges.