Yasmin Cader

About

Yasmin Cader is a Deputy Legal Director and the Director of the Trone Center for Justice and Equality at the American Civil Liberties Union. The Trone Center encompasses the ACLU’s work on criminal and racial justice through its National Prison Project, Criminal Law Reform Project, Racial Justice Program, Capital Punishment Project, Abortion Criminal Defense Initiative and John Adams project, assisting in the defense of the capitally charged Guantánamo detainees. 

In her 30+-year career, Yasmin served as a public defender in Superior Court in Washington, D.C., and in federal courts in New York and Los Angeles, representing juveniles and adults facing serious felony charges, including capital offenses as well as domestic and international terrorism.  She also worked as a staff attorney with the Employment Litigation Section of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. 

Prior to joining the ACLU, Yasmin was the co-founder of Cader Adams Trial Lawyers, a women-owned litigation boutique in Los Angeles.   

Yasmin currently lives in Los Angeles and is also a leader in several programs devoted to racial justice work on a national level. She is a member of the Opportunity Agenda’s Steering Committee, amplifying voices and narratives that change how the public perceives and understands systemic inequities and oppression in the criminal legal system.   

Yasmin began her career as a judicial law clerk to the Honorable Damon J. Keith of the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. She is a graduate of Howard University and Yale Law School.

Yasmin Cader

Agenda

Image on Yuna Blajer de la Garza
Apr
26
DEIB: Vision, Framing, and Action in a Post-SFFA World
We have been here before. At critical inflection points throughout history, racial justice and civil rights progress has been met with well-funded and coordinated attacks that have translated into powerful backlash. So for many of us, the Supreme Court's recent decision in SFFA v. Harvard was not a surprise, but rather a culmination of decades of attempts to tether an ahistorical colorblind ideology to the Equal Protection Clause. Since the overturning of affirmative action, the various strategies to dismantle Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts in higher education and the workplace...