Sandra Park is a Senior Staff Attorney in the ACLU Women’s Rights Project. At the ACLU, Sandra engages in litigation, policy advocacy, and public education at the federal, state, and local levels to advance gender equality and the rights of women and girls. Sandra has advocated for survivors of gender-based violence throughout her legal career. Much of her current work focuses on holding institutions accountable for perpetuating violence and discrimination in housing, law enforcement response, and schools. She has deep expertise in fair housing and has challenged the impact of evictions on women of color and discrimination against survivors of gender-based violence.
Sandra’s efforts have resulted in key precedent promoting the First Amendment, civil rights, and due process rights of survivors. It has also led to the strengthening of the housing protections in the Violence Against Women Act, numerous state laws advancing the housing and employment rights of survivors, and important regulations and guidance from the U.S. Departments of Justice and Housing and Urban Development on gender-biased policing, survivors’ rights in housing, and how local crime-free and nuisance ordinances can violate civil rights law. Most recently, she led the ACLU’s strategy to prevent mass evictions during the COVID-19 pandemic and championed laws adopting the right to counsel for tenants facing eviction.
Sandra is also responsible for the ACLU’s work expanding patients’ genetic privacy rights and addressing the intersection of patent regulation and civil liberties. She represented twenty medical and women’s health organizations, geneticists, and patients in a groundbreaking lawsuit challenging patents granted on two human genes related to hereditary breast and ovarian cancer, resulting in a unanimous 2013 U.S. Supreme Court ruling invalidating gene patenting (Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics).
Sandra currently serves as Board Chair of Girls for Gender Equity, an intergenerational organization that centers the leadership of girls of color, and as a Board Member of the New York City Bar Association. She was selected as a Movement Maker by Move to End Violence, a ten-year initiative of the NoVo Foundation to build the social justice movement in the U.S. to end violence against girls and women. She has published dozens of reports and articles related to the civil and human rights of survivors of gender-based violence.
Before joining the ACLU, she worked as a Skadden Fellow at the Legal Aid Society of New York, creating a project that provided comprehensive legal services to hundreds of immigrant survivors of gender-based violence. She clerked for U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein of the Southern District of New York and is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College and NYU School of Law.