Bio
Adjunct Professor Laura Faer currently serves as a Supervising Deputy Attorney General with the California Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Enforcement Section. In this role, Professor Faer investigates and litigates a broad array of complex civil rights matters on behalf of the Attorney General.
Prior to this position, Professor Faer served as Director of the United States Department of Education’s San Francisco Office for Civil Rights (OCR). In that position, Professor Faer oversaw OCR’s civil rights compliance and enforcement program in California.
Professor Faer has focused her legal practice on civil rights, education equity, and children’s rights law. She successfully represented four foster siblings who were unlawfully segregated from the public school setting, ensured millions of dollars in funding was maintained for students with severe mental health disabilities, challenged solitary confinement and education deprivation conditions for youth in the juvenile justice system, and helped defend against a constitutional challenge to Los Angeles Unified School District’s voluntary integration program.
Professor Faer was named a California Lawyer Attorney of the Year in 2011 for securing the landmark settlement in Casey A. v. Gundry, a class action alleging that youth detained at the largest complex of probation camps in the nation were denied a constitutionally adequate education. Professor Faer also worked extensively on the statewide education reform and equity case, Williams v. State of California.
Professor Faer served as the Directing Attorney of the Children’s Rights Project, Public Counsel’s largest program. At the time that she served in this role, the Children’s Rights Project involved 700-plus volunteers advocating for more than 28,000 children and youth annually. The Project facilitated hundreds of legal guardianships and adoptions, and provided guardian ad litems for children harmed while in foster care and education advocacy for low-income and foster youth and youth in the juvenile justice system.
As the former founder and director of the Statewide Education Rights Project, Professor Faer utilized a variety of legal tools, including litigation, policy advocacy, and direct service representation, to create a model for bringing about systemic statewide education reforms. Professor Faer led Public Counsel’s sponsorship of a number of groundbreaking pieces of legislation, including AB 1933, ensuring education stability rights for foster youth, and AB 420, limiting suspensions and expulsions for the catch-all category of “willful defiance.” In 2012, she successfully led an effort to pass seven bills aimed at improving outcomes for students of color, foster youth, and students with disabilities. She also co-developed the Fix School Discipline Toolkits and FixSchoolDiscipline.org website, one stop resources for addressing the school-to-prison pipeline and stopping school pushout.
As a Skadden Law Fellow, Professor Faer worked to improve education outcomes and educational quality for low-income children in some of South Los Angeles’ lowest performing schools. She ran a community-based education law clinic and successfully advocated for state legislative and regulatory changes related to California’s implementing statutes for the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Improvement Act of 2004.
Professor Faer clerked for Judge Stephen Reinhardt on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. She has received various awards for her representation of community-based organizations and championship of civil rights issues, including Children’s Advocacy Institute’s Legislative Advocate of the Year in 2012-13.