Alumnus/Alumna of the Month

Lisa Kung '97

Read an Interview with Lisa Kung.

Lisa Kung is director of the Southern Center for Human Rights (SCHR), one of the most respected civil and human rights law firms in the country. Based in Atlanta, the Center was created in 1976 to respond to the deplorable conditions in prisons and jails in the South and the United States Supreme Court's decision that year allowing the resumption of capital punishment. Since its creation, SCHR has used an aggressive and creative mix of litigation, public education, advocacy, grassroots organizing, and work with other organizations and individuals to protect the civil and human rights of people prosecuted in the criminal courts—including those facing the death penalty—and confined in the prisons and jails of the South.

Kung joined the Center in 1999 as a staff attorney, focusing on litigating prison and jail conditions in Georgia and Alabama. She was lead and co counsel in a number of major cases, including class action litigation challenging extreme overcrowding and poor medical care in various jails; guard brutality at the Georgia prison incarcerating the state=s most seriously mentally ill men; the lack of indigent defense in Coweta County, Georgia; and on behalf of all women incarcerated in Alabama. Kung became the Center=s director in January 2006.

While at NYU School of Law, Kung was editor in chief of the Review of Law and Social Change. Following Law School, Kung was a Rockefeller Brother Fund Fellow at the Vera Institute of Justice in New York City. She then returned to Atlanta to work at the Law Center for the Homeless as a Soros Justice Fellow. Her undergraduate joint degree in physics and philosophy is from Emory University. She was recently named by American Lawyer as one of the nation's top 50 young litigators.