Juan Cartagena
Juan Cartagena is a civil rights attorney who serves as General Counsel at the Community Service Society (CCS) of New York where he litigates, among other things, voting rights cases on behalf of poor communities. Mr. Cartagena has held previous positions with the Puerto Rican Legal Defense & Education Fund and with the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico's Department of Puerto Rican Community Affairs.

Since 1981 he has represented Latino and African-American communities in voting rights litigation in a number of states including Pennsylvania, New York, Illinois, New Jersey, and New Hampshire. At CSS, Juan established a national clearinghouse for litigation under the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, which provided research and other support services to over 50 attorneys in the country who formed a NVRA Implementation Attorney Network.

He is currently co-chair of the New York Voting Rights Consortium -- a collection of major legal defense funds that protect the voting rights of racial and language minorities and is one of the attorneys in Hayden v. Pataki, a challenge to New York State’s felon disenfranchisement laws. In 2003 he also served on the New Jersey State Planning Committee for the Help America Vote Act. His has two upcoming articles on voting rights, currently in press: “New Jersey’s Multi-Member Legislative Districts and Latino Political Power,” with Rutgers Law School Race and the Law Journal and “Latinos and Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act: Beyond Black and White,” with Columbia Law School’s National Black Law Journal. Mr. Cartagena is a graduate of Dartmouth College and Columbia University Law School.

Kimberle Williams Crenshaw
Kimberle Crenshaw is a Professor of Law at UCLA and at Columbia Law School. Writing in the area of Civil Rights, Black feminist legal theory, and race, racism and the law, her articles have appeared in the Harvard Law Review, National Black Law Journal, Stanford Law Review and Southern California Law Review. She is the founding coordinator of the Critical Race Theory Workshop, and the co-editor of a volume, Critical Race Theory: Key Documents That Shaped the Movement. Professor Crenshaw has lectured nationally and internationally on race matters, addressing audiences throughout Europe, Africa and South America.

A specialist on race and gender equality, she has facilitated workshops for Civil Rights activists in Brazil and constitutional court judges in South Africa. Her work on race and gender was influential in the drafting of the equality clause in the South African Constitution. In 2001 she authored the background paper on Race and Gender Discrimination for the United Nation’s World Conference on Racism, served as the Rapporteur for the Expert Group on Race and Gender, and coordinated the NGO forum to facilitate the inclusion of gender in the WCAR Conference Declaration.

In the domestic arena, she served as a member of the National Science Foundation's committee to research violence against women, and assisted the legal team representing Anita Hill. In 1996 she co-founded the African American Policy Forum to highlight the centrality of gender in racial justice discourses. Professor Crenshaw, formerly a Contributor on MSNBC, is a founding member of the Women's Media Initiative and is a regular commentator on NPR’s “The Tavis Smiley Show.” She was twice awarded Professor of the Year at UCLA Law School and received the Lucy Terry Prince Unsung Heroine Award presented by the Lawyers Committee on Civil Rights Under Law for her groundbreaking work on Black women and the law.

Professor Crenshaw was featured in the May issue of Essence Magazine, "The Beautiful Ones: 35 of the Most Remarkable Women in the World." She is an ACLU Ira Glasser Racial Justice Fellow for 2005-2007. Professor Crenshaw is a graduate of Cornell University and Harvard Law School. She received her L.L.M. from the University of Wisconsin Law School where she was a William H. Hastie Fellow. After completing her L.L.M. Professor Crenshaw served as a law clerk for Shirley Abrahamson of the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Miles Rappoport
Miles Rapoport is the President of Demos. Demos' purpose is to help build a society where America can achieve its highest democratic ideals. Founded in 1999, Demos' work combines research with advocacy - melding the commitment to ideas of a think tank with the organizing strategies of an advocacy group. Since the 2000 election, Demos has been working with a spirited reform movement at the national and state levels to promote a broad agenda of voting rights and election reform, including major new efforts to bolster voter registration and voting and remove barriers to political participation. As President, Mr. Rapoport sets Demos' agenda and oversees the management of the organization and fundraising efforts.

Prior to assuming the helm at Demos, he served for ten years in the Connecticut legislature. In 1994, he was elected as Secretary of the State of Connecticut. As a state legislator, he was a leading expert on electoral reform, chairing the Committee on Elections. As Secretary of the State, Rapoport released two unique reports on the state of democracy in Connecticut. His articles have appeared in national magazines and newspapers, and he is the founder of Northeast Action, a leading political reform organization in New England. Rapoport moved to Demos from his position as Executive Director of DemocracyWorks, a Hartford-based group that works on democracy reform.