Celebrating King Hall event to mark outstanding achievements

Professor Katherine Florey will receive UC Davis School of Law's 2021 Distinguished Teaching Award during the virtual Celebrating King Hall event on March 15. Monika Kalra Varma '00, the Distinguished Alumna Award winner, and Errol C. Dauis '11, recipient of the Rising Star Alumnus Award, also will be honored.

A Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law, Florey teaches and researches in the areas of private international law, federal Indian law, civil procedure and public health law and policy. Within these fields, she is particularly interested in the extraterritorial application of law, theories of jurisdiction, and tribes' regulatory and adjudicative powers.

Florey’s scholarship has appeared in the Virginia Law Review, California Law Review and UCLA Law Review as well as the Notre Dame Law Review, in which she recently wrote about COVID-19 and domestic travel restrictions. She explored the same topic in a 2020 op-ed for CalMatters.

Before joining the UC Davis faculty in 2007, Florey served as a law clerk to the Honorable William Fletcher of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and as an associate at the San Francisco law firm Keker & Van Nest LLP.

She received her J.D. from UC Berkeley School of Law, where she was articles editor of the law review and received the Thelen Marrin Award for graduating first in her class.

Florey holds a bachelor’s degree from Harvard College, where she graduated summa cum laude, and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Warren Wilson College. Before law school, she worked for several years as an editor, travel writer and theater critic.

Varma, executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, has dedicated her career to human rights and social justice work.

Varma leads LCCRSF – the oldest civil rights institutions on the West Coast – in its mission to dismantle systems of oppression and racism and build an equitable and just society. Formed in 1968 to bridge the legal community and the civil rights movement, LCCSRF has a rich history of advancing the rights of people of color, immigrants, refugees and low-income individuals. Varma is leading the organization to a number of victories, including the repeal of an unconstitutional loitering ordinance in Oakland, a federal court ruling protecting immigrant youth in California, and the legalization of public banking in California.

Before assuming her current role in 2017, Varma spent five years as executive director of the D.C. Bar Pro Bono Center. The largest provider of pro bono legal services in the District of Columbia, the center serves 20,000 individuals, nonprofit organizations and small businesses.

Before that, Varma directed the Center for Human Rights at the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights. At the RFK Center, Varma advanced movements to ensure a right to health in Haiti; end untouchability in India; rebuild the Gulf Coast after Katrina; increase access to justice in Chad, and stop modern-day slave-labor conditions faced by migrant farm workers in Florida. 

Soon after graduating from UC Davis Law, Varma worked as an associate legal officer with the office of the prosecutor at the U.N. War Crimes Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Her trial team secured the tribunal’s first conviction of the crime of terror against General Stanislav Galic, the Serb military commander in Sarajevo from 1992-94.

Varma is the recipient of the 2016 South Asian Bar Association of North America’s Public Interest Achievement Award and the 2019 Northern California South Asian Bar Association’s Public Interest Award. 

Dauis, an employment law attorney at Sacramento’s Boutin Jones law firm, has been honored as a Northern California Super Lawyers Rising Star for Employment and Labor for four straight years. This year, he also was named one of Best Lawyers’ “Ones to Watch.” He is a member of Sacramento County Bar Association’s Diversity Hiring and Retention Committee and former board president of La Raza Centro Legal.

Dauis has taught at the law school, and has served as a tutor and mentor to participants in the King Hall Outreach Program. As a student, he served as editor-in-chief of the law review, and as a founding board member of the Coalition for Diversity at King Hall.

 

 

 

 

 

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