Matambanadzo named to civil rights advisory panel

Tulane Law Professor Saru Matambanadzo has been appointed to a four-year term on the Louisiana Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

The state panels conduct hearings and make recommendations to the commission on local civil rights concerns, such as justice, voting, housing, education and discrimination. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is an independent, bipartisan agency that advises the president and Congress and produces an annual federal civil rights enforcement report.

Matambanadzo, the Moise S. Steeg Jr. Associate Professor of Law, is a nationally known authority on gender equality and workplace equity whose scholarship takes an interdisciplinary approach to exploring legal personhood, animal rights, legal education and laws related to pregnancy. She joined the Tulane Law faculty in 2010 and in 2014-15 was the inaugural Gordon Gamm Faculty Scholar, an award that supports the work of early-career professors.

She teaches gender law, feminist legal theory and business enterprises and in 2017 was named the Emily Ratner and New Day II Professor of Social Entrepreneurship at Tulane University’s Phyllis M. Taylor Center for Social Innovation and Design Thinking. In that role, she is applying design-thinking methodology toward problems of food justice and toward addressing the challenges mothers in the Gulf South Region face with employment discrimination, maternal health and resource accessibility. 

Several Tulane Law alumni also were named to the state committee: Chair Robert Lancaster (L ’93), director of clinical legal education at Louisiana State University’s Paul M. Herbert Law Center; Randy Boudreaux (L ’95) of New Orleans; Marjorie Esman (L ’86), executivie director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana; and George Fowler (L ’75) of New Orleans.