Jayashri Srikantiah

Jayashri Srikantiah is the founding director of the law school’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic. She was was named Associate Dean of Clinical Education and Director of the Mills Legal Clinic in the spring of 2019. She has represented scores of immigrants facing removal from the United States, with a focus on representing immigrants with past criminal convictions. Professor Srikantiah has conducted impact litigation, community outreach, public education, and policy advocacy in partnership with a broad range of immigration non-profits, on issues ranging from immigration detention to protections for immigrant survivors of domestic violence. She has litigated numerous cases in the immigration courts, the federal district courts, the federal courts of appeals, and the U.S. Supreme Court. Professor Srikantiah’s litigation projects include cases seeking to establish constitutional limits on the federal government’s immigration detention practices, cases to uncover the federal government’s immigration practices, and cases relating to the immigration consequences of past criminal convictions.

Professor Srikantiah’s research and scholarly work explores the role of administrative discretion in immigration decision making in various areas as well as the pedagogy of multi-modal law clinics. Professor Srikantiah is a frequent speaker on various immigration topics, including comprehensive immigration reform, the constitutional rights of immigrants, and immigration detention.

Professor Srikantiah has received numerous awards, including California Lawyer’s 2014 Attorney of the Year, SIREN’s 2017 Legal Advocate of the Year, and the 2017 Carol Weiss King Award from the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild.

Before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 2004, Professor Srikantiah was the associate legal director of the ACLU of Northern California and a staff attorney at the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project. Professor Srikantiah has also worked as an associate at the law firm of Howard Rice Nemerovski Canady Falk & Rabkin, and was a law clerk to Judge David R. Thompson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.