Katie Belanger

Lead Consultant

Katie is the Lead Consultant at Local Solutions Support Center (LSSC). During her tenure at LSSC, Katie has focused on deepening cross-movement collaboration by building and supporting state campaigns and coalitions to defend against state interference in local policy-making and advance home rule reform. As Lead Consultant, Katie facilitates communication, collaboration, and engagement with LSSC’s network and partners and coordinates the day-to-day operation of LSSC.

Katie brings nearly twenty years of experience with social justice and political work to LSSC, highlights from which include securing groundbreaking legal protections for same-sex couples and transgender individuals in her home state of Wisconsin, leading a national campaign for inclusive nondiscrimination policies, and successfully fundraising for multi-million dollar grassroots campaigns and political candidates. In 2015, Katie launched her consulting practice, Katie B. Strategies, LLC, through which she facilitates aligning around a shared mission, engaging and developing leaders, and delivering real successes to the communities her clients serve, bringing these groups of people together to make the world more fair, equal, and inclusive.

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LeadershipAdam Polaski
Nestor Davidson

Fordham University School of Law and Urban Law Center

Nestor Davidson joined Fordham in 2011 and was named the Albert A. Walsh Professor of Real Estate, Land Use and Property Law in 2017. Professor Davidson is an expert in property, urban law, and affordable housing law and policy, and is the co-author of the casebook Property Law: Rules, Policies and Practices (7th ed. 2017). Professor Davidson founded and serves as the faculty director of the law school’s Urban Law Center and previously served as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs.

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LegalAdam Polaski
Richard Briffault

Columbia University School of Law

Richard Briffault is the Joseph P. Chamberlain Professor of Legislation at Columbia Law School. His research, writing, and teaching focus on state and local government law, legislation, the law of the political process, government ethics, and property.

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Jorge X. Camacho

Yale Law School

Jorge X. Camacho is a Clinical Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School and the Policing, Law, and Policy Director of the Justice Collaboratory. Prior to joining Yale and the Justice Collaboratory, he served as Senior Counsel at the New York City Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice and as Senior Counsel in the Legal Counsel Division of the New York City Office of the Corporation Counsel. He started his career as an Assistant District Attorney at the Manhattan District Attorney's Office and served on multiple task forces and citywide committees throughout his years in government service, including serving on the Steering Committee of the New York City Mayor’s Task Force on Cannabis Legalization and chairing its Subcommittee on Law Enforcement and Social Justice. He received his B.A. from Swarthmore College, where he was a Philip Evans Scholar, and his J.D. from Yale Law School, where he served as a Notes Editor on the Yale Law Journal.

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Dan Farbman

Boston College Law

Dan Farbman joined the Boston College Law faculty as an Assistant Professor of Law in 2017. He teaches and writes in the areas of local government law, legal history, constitutional law, the legal profession, civil rights, and property. His work focuses on the legal history of radical reform movements in public law both from an institutional perspective and from the perspective of the practice of cause lawyering.

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Sarah Fox

Northern Illinois University College of Law

Sarah Fox is an associate professor at Northern Illinois University College of Law. Her research focuses on environmental law, land use, and property, particularly the unique environmental issues facing cities and the capacity that local governments may have to solve those problems. She teaches courses in environmental law, state and local government law, and property.

Fox received her B.A. from the University of Oklahoma and her J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center. Following law school, she clerked for the Honorable Claire V. Eagan in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Oklahoma and worked in the New York offices of Jones Day and Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan. Prior to teaching at NIU, she was a clinical teaching fellow in the environmental law clinic at Georgetown University Law Center, where she represented numerous non-profit organizational clients and supervised student work on cases addressing environmental issues in state and federal court.

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Steven L. Nelson, J.D., Ph.D.

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Dr. Nelson is an Associate Professor of Education Policy & Leadership and department chair in the Educational Psychology, Leadership, and Higher Education Department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Prior to his current appointment, Dr. Nelson served on the faculty of the University of Memphis (as Program Coordinator) and the University of New Orleans. He has taught and led in charter schools, traditional public schools, and private schools in the New Orleans area. He also served as the first-ever Education Advocate at the Southern Poverty Law Center’s School-to-Prison Pipeline Project in New Orleans, where he worked on charter school law and policy, special education access and equity, and juvenile justice issues.  

Dr. Nelson’s research and teaching interests are at the intersection of education law, education policy, and the politics of education. In particular, his research and teaching consider how education reform laws, policies, and political dynamics advance, impede, or regress efforts at achieving educational equity for Black students, families, and communities in urban settings. He considers himself a Critical Race Theorist. His work has been published in various media including law reviews, education journals, and edited books. Dr. Nelson’s work has been covered in the Washington Post and on national blogs, such as Cloaking Inequity. He maintains active memberships in the American Educational Research Association, the University Council of Educational Administration, the Critical Race Studies in Education Association, the Education Law Association, the Association of Urban Law Scholars, and the Law & Society Association. He fulfills leadership roles in some of these organizations and frequently presents scholarly works and/or professional developments at international and national conferences and research symposia.

Dr. Nelson is currently serving as a Non-Resident Faculty Fellow at the Fordham University Urban Law Center. He is currently the Division L, Section 2 Chairperson and the Law & Education Special Interest Group Program Chair in the American Educational Research Association. He is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Research on Leadership Education. He also holds appointments on the editorial boards of prestigious research journals, namely Urban Education and Educational Researcher

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Erin Scharff

Arizona State University Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law

Erin Adele Scharff writes about tax policy and tax federalism. Prior to joining the faculty of the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, Professor Scharff was an acting assistant professor of tax law at New York University School of Law. After graduating magna cum laude from New York University School of Law, she clerked for the Honorable William A. Fletcher of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco. In law school, she was a Root-Tilden-Kern Scholar, a Furman Academic Scholar, and an articles editor for the NYU Law Review.

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Richard Schragger

University of Virginia School of Law

Rich Schragger joined the Virginia faculty in 2001 and was named the Perre Bowen Professor in 2013. His scholarship focuses on the intersection of constitutional law and local government law, federalism, urban policy and the constitutional and economic status of cities. He also writes about law and religion. He has authored articles on the Establishment and Free Exercise clauses, the role of cities in a federal system, local recognition of same-sex marriage, takings law and economic development, and the history of the anti-chain store movement. Schragger has published in the Harvard, Yale, Chicago, Virginia, and Michigan law reviews, among others. He teaches property, local government law, urban law and policy, and church and state.

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Joshua Sellers

University of Texas School of Law

Joshua Sellers is Professor of Law at the University of Texas School of Law. He teaches and writes in the areas of election law, constitutional law, race and the law, and American politics. He has published in leading journals, including the Stanford Law ReviewVanderbilt Law ReviewUniversity of Pennsylvania Law Review, and New York University Law Review. His scholarship has twice in recent years been recognized with awards from the AALS Section on Election Law, and in 2022, Professor Sellers was awarded the prestigious Berlin Prize by the American Academy in Berlin for representing the highest standards of excellence in his field. He was elected to the American Law Institute in 2023 and is an adviser on the Institute's Election Litigation project.

Before entering teaching, Professor Sellers was a law clerk to Judge Rosemary Barkett of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, and a litigation associate at Jenner & Block LLP in Washington, D.C.

Professor Sellers holds a J.D. and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago, where he served as an articles editor of the University of Chicago Law Review, and a B.A. in Political Science and Afroamerican and African Studies from the University of Michigan.

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Rick Su

University of North Carolina School of Law

Rick Su is a Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina School of Law, where he teaches and writes in the areas of local government law, immigration, and federalism. His research focuses on the intersection between cities and immigration. His work has appeared in the Columbia Law Review, the William & Mary Law Review, the Emory Law Journal, and the North Carolina Law Review.

Su received his B.A. from Dartmouth College in 2001 and his J.D. from Harvard Law School in 2004. After graduating from law school, he clerked for The Honorable Stephen Reinhardt on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and worked in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Prior to joining the Carolina Law faculty in 2019, Su taught at the University at Buffalo School of Law, where he won the faculty teaching award in 2009 and 2015. He was a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School in 2015 and Washington University in St. Louis School of Law in 2018.

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Professor PanelAdam Polaski