Leadership
Faculty Director
Melissa Murray
Melissa Murray is the Frederick I. and Grace Stokes Professor of Law at NYU and faculty director of the Birnbaum Women’s Leadership Network. Murray is a graduate of the University of Virginia, where she was a Jefferson Scholar and an Echols Scholar, and Yale Law School, where she was notes development editor of the Yale Law Journal and earned special recognition as an NAACP-LDF/Shearman & Sterling Scholar. Following law school, Murray clerked for Sonia Sotomayor, then of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and Stefan Underhill of the US District Court for the District of Connecticut. Murray teaches constitutional law, family law, criminal law, and reproductive rights and justice, and her research focuses on the legal regulation of sex and sexuality and encompasses such topics as marriage and its alternatives, the marriage equality debate, the legal recognition of caregiving, and reproductive rights and justice. Her publications have appeared (or are forthcoming) in the California Law Review, Columbia Law Review, Harvard Law Review, and Yale Law Journal, among others. She is an author of Cases on Reproductive Rights and Justice, the first casebook to cover the field of reproductive rights and justice. She has also written for the New York Times, Vanity Fair, and the Huffington Post, and has offered commentary for NPR, MSNBC, and PBS, among other media outlets. In 2010, Murray was awarded the Association of American Law School’s Derrick A. Bell Award, which is given to a junior faculty member who has made an extraordinary contribution to legal education, the legal system, or social justice. Murray was previously on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, where she was the recipient of the Rutter Award for Teaching Distinction. From March 2016 to June 2017, she served as interim dean of Berkeley Law. Twitter: @ProfMMurray
Executive Director
Jennifer Weiss-Wolf
Attorney and author Jennifer Weiss-Wolf joined the Birnbaum Women’s Leadership Network in 2022 as executive director. Prior she was vice president and the inaugural women and democracy fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law. She also leads partnerships and strategy at Ms. – the feminist movement-making magazine. A passionate writer on and advocate for issues of gender and politics, Weiss-Wolf was dubbed the “architect of the U.S. campaign to squash the tampon tax” by Newsweek; her 2017 book Periods Gone Public: Taking a Stand for Menstrual Equity was lauded by Gloria Steinem as “the beginning of liberation for us all.” Her forthcoming book, Period. Full Stop. The Politics of Menopause will be published by NYU Press (2025). Weiss-Wolf’s scholarship and writing have been published by the NYU Review of Law and Social Change, Columbia Journal of Gender and Law, and William and Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice. Her writing and work have also been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, TIME, Cosmopolitan, Harper’s Bazaar, Teen Vogue, NPR, PBS, and NowThis, among others. Weiss-Wolf received her JD from Cardozo Law School, where she was editor-in-chief of the Cardozo Women’s Law Journal, and her BA in government from Lafayette College. Twitter: @jweisswolf
Assistant Director of Program Initiatives
Shirley Dang
Shirley Dang is the assistant director of program initiatives for the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging and the Birnbaum Women's Leadership Network (BWLN) at NYU School of Law. She has been with the Meltzer Center since its inception in 2016 assisting the directors with event planning and administrative matters. She has prior professional experience working in education and medical nonprofits, and managing grant portfolios for a philanthropic fund. She holds a BA in Asian and Asian American Studies from Stony Brook University, an MA in International Education from NYU Steinhardt, and an MPA in Public and Nonprofit Management specializing in social impact, investment, and innovation from NYU Wagner.
Assistant Director of Strategic and Student Initiatives
Claire Whitman
Claire Whitman is the assistant director of strategic and student initiatives for the Birnbaum Women’s Leadership Network and the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging at NYU Law. She has been with the BWLN since its inception in 2018 and joined the Meltzer Center in December 2022. She came to the Law School in 2015 as leadership initiatives coordinator; in this position, she helped implement a wide range of leadership programming, including workshops for students and law firms, as well as conversations with notable guest speakers. Prior to NYU Law, Claire spent three years working as the assistant to the president of a small cultural nonprofit in New York City before attending graduate school. She graduated from Oberlin College with a BA in politics and received an MA in political communications from Goldsmiths, University of London. She is currently pursuing an advanced certificate in management for public and non-profit organizations at NYU Wagner.
Affiliated Faculty
Florencia Marotta-Wurgler ’01 is the Boxer Family Professor of Law at NYU Law and the faculty director of NYU Law Abroad in Buenos Aires. A former faculty co-director of the Birnbaum Women’s Leadership Network, she continues to support the BWLN through empirical research and supervision of the Abby Lyn Gillette Research Assistantship. Her teaching and research interests are contracts, consumer privacy, electronic commerce, and law and economics. Her published research has addressed various problems associated with standard form contracts online, such as the effectiveness of disclosure regimes and whether people read the fine print. She is currently working on a large empirical project on consumer privacy policies online and on the effectiveness of the Federal Trade Commission’s privacy enforcement actions. In 2009, she testified before the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation at a hearing titled, “Aggressive Sales Tactics on the Internet and Their Impact on American Consumers.” She is a co-reporter of the American Law Institute’s Restatement of the Law of Consumer Contracts, a board member of the American Law and Economics Association, and a fellow at the Law School's Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy. She received a BA magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania and a JD cum laude from NYU School of Law.
Partners
K.M. Zouhary is the founder of Cadenza Communications and serves as a consultant for the Women’s Leadership Fellows Program. She believes in the transformational power of improvisation. She founded Cadenza Communications to help professionals connect with their audiences by improving communication, persuasion, and negotiation skills. Zouhary’s nonlinear career path started in The Second City’s smoke‐filled lobby, led her to the halls of Washington, and zigzagged back to Chicago’s courtrooms. As an attorney at Proskauer Rose and Schiff Hardin, she represented clients in court and before administrative agencies. Zouhary investigated significant claims of discrimination, harassment, and retaliation for her clients. Prior to her legal career, Zouhary served as Chief of Staff of the National Endowment for the Arts and Associate Producer of HAIRSPRAY (Broadway). She graduated from the Second City Chicago’s Conservatory, studied improvisation at the Magnet Theatre and PIT, and performed at St. Ann’s Warehouse and Ars Nova. Zouhary’s students nominated her for the 2018 Outstanding Adjunct Professor Award at Northwestern University School of Law. She appeared on 60 Minutes in connection with her clinical work for the Center on Wrongful Convictions of Youth. Zouhary received her JD (magna cum laude and Order of the Coif) from Northwestern University School of Law and her BA (cum laude) from Yale.
Monica Parham, who worked with the BWLN to develop the Women’s Leadership Fellows Program, passed away in 2020.
Monica Parham was a consultant, speaker, coach, and facilitator in the areas of diversity and inclusion, talent, and professional/leadership development. She worked with individuals ranging from pre-college students to executive-level leaders, and with for-profit, non-profit, educational and government entities. Parham served as president of the Women’s Bar Association of the District of Columbia and the Women’s Bar Association Foundation — the first woman of color to hold both roles. She held leadership roles with several community-facing organizations and serves on the advisory board of the Honors College at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Parham was an appointed member of the Federal Communications Commission’s Advisory Committee on Diversity and Digital Empowerment (ACDDE), focusing on expanding opportunities in the telecommunications and tech industries. Previously, Parham served as Diversity Counsel/Head of Diversity at Crowell & Moring LLP, where she worked across firm functions and with internal and external stakeholders to address and enhance the recruitment, retention, and promotion of attorneys from traditionally underrepresented groups. She was a former president of the Association of Law Firm Diversity Professionals, and in 2011 was named a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation for her inclusion work. Prior to moving into D&I, Parham was a commercial litigator. Parham received her JD from Yale Law School, where she was Finals Chairman of the Yale Moot Court Board, and a BA with honors and distinction in political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she was a Morehead-Cain Scholar and Phi Beta Kappa.