PRESIDENT

PRESIDENT

Milad Momeni (he/him) is a housing attorney and tenant advocate at Himmelstein, McConnell, Gribben and Joseph LLP. He joined the NLG as a law student at Pace and has been a member of the NLG-NYC EC for about five years. At Pace, he was a recipient of Pace’s Sobie Pasternack Award in Civil Rights and the Vanessa H. Merton Public Service Award. Milad has a history of organizing work in anti-imperialist and poverty movements, and has been involved in various grassroots movements since he was a student at Kenyon College. He is also a faith-based organizer for Muslims for Progressive Values. During law school, Milad completed internships at the Urban Justice Center and the Constitutional Law Center for Muslims in America, where he engaged in investigations and litigation in furtherance of upholding the rights of asylum seekers from West Asia and North Africa, and defended the rights of individuals facing various forms of racial and religious discrimination. Before joining Himmelstein McConnell in October 2023, Milad worked as an attorney for the Legal Services of the Hudson Valley's Systemic Change Unit, representing Westchester County and Orange County residents in nonpayment and holdover eviction proceedings as well as landlord harassment, repair actions, and multi-plaintiff litigation.

VICE PRESIDENTS

Erica Johnson Erica is a standup comedian and a NLG legal observer. She's held several leadership positions with the Guild including co-chair of the NYC Mass Defense Committee where she's helped shape the future and relationship of NYC in a more open and honest way. She combines her passion for social justice with her comedic pursuits often bringing lawyers from the Guild and other spaces to comedy shows to talk about the work they do. One major collaboration she fostered was with the Lady Parts Justice to talk about legal observing at abortion clinics in Queens. Erica graduated from American University in Washington, D.C., with a MA in Strategic Communications in 2019. She's also the Founder and Chief Storytelling Officer at Sir Carter Carter (Majer News), a news site focused on comedy, entertainment, culture, and news. When Erica's not working on Sir Carter Carter (Majer News) or writing pilots, sketches, and standup routines, she looks for ways to develop her craft. Venturing out into the world, trying new foods, reading books, and playing games give her life during the pandemic.
Marc Ramirez is an attorney advisor at the Office of the Pardon Attorney. Before that he was public defender in the Bronx for six years. He earned his J.D. from the City University of New York (CUNY) School of Law, with a concentration in Social Justice, Equality & Civil Rights. While at CUNY Law, he interned with organizations that served vulnerable populations, including those with criminal records, the LGBTQQ community, homeless and displaced youth, and undocumented immigrants.

TREASURER

Garrett Kaske has been committed to the struggle for workplace justice for over 15 years. Garrett started as a paralegal at an employee-side employment law firm from 2007 to 2010 and then attended CUNY Law (‘13), where he was part of the school’s workers’ rights clinic, held several workers’ rights internships, and was active in the school’s NLG student organization and Labor Coalition. Since 2014 Garrett has been a litigation associate at Kessler Matura, P.C., where he represents employees subjected to discrimination, harassment, and wage theft in individual and in class actions. Garrett has been a member of NLG-NYC since 2011. He has primarily been involved with the Labor & Employment Committee, which he has co-chaired since 2013. In this capacity, he has worked to build the Guild’s presence in the NY-area labor movement by hosting social events for law students and recent graduates, organizing uniquely pro-worker CLEs, and supporting workplace campaigns through letter writing, picketing, and trainings.

EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE

Miles Ashton is a private practice attorney focusing on protester defense and First Amendment issues. He has been a member of the National Lawyers Guild since his first year of law school at CUNY Law. He was also currently a member of the NYC-NLG Executive Committee.
Tamara received her Master's degree from New York University and her JD from the University of Virginia. A lifelong learner, she is returning now for a PhD. Tamara has been a member of the NLG-NYC Chapter for ten years. She is Chair of the NYC Animal Rights committee and a member of the Guild's Executive Committee. As a long-time Legal Observer, Tamara has watched many different protests and causes but, most consistently at animal rights actions. Tamara has successfully represented animal rescue groups, pro bono. She is a donor and member of numerous animal rights groups, as well as a dog and cat rescuer. As an employment attorney, Tamara champions women in the workplace under Title VII, the FMLA and the ADEA. Her special focus is sexual harassment and retaliation claims. She is currently with Pedowitz, Meister, LLP."
King co-hosts the WBAI morning program Good Morning Nueva York. He is a lawyer, filmmaker and journalist. King is active in the chapter’s Mass Defense Committee, and for a number of years was the Director of Mass Defense in the NLG’s National Office, where he was visible for his pro-active workstyle joining NLG Legal Observers on the ground in Ferguson, Missouri following the killing of Michael Brown, in North Dakota during the Standing Rock protests and in Charlotte for the Unite the Right counter protests. King framed a “rapid- response” model for the national NLG Mass Defense Committee, for instances where social justice mobilizations occur in localities where there is no formal NLG chapter, or where there are at-large members with no formal mass defense committee. King earlier worked as National Coordinator for the ACLU’s Campaign to End Racial Profiling, and as a Program Analyst for Healing Justice Work at the American Friends Service Committee in Philadelphia. King is a graduate of Rutgers Law School, founder of the Human Rights-Racial Justice Center and has directed justice campaigns for many national organizations. King is a musician, and tries his hand at "sit down" comedy.
Stephen Ferrante is a public defender with Queens Defenders. He joined the NLG in 2020 as a student at Pace Law School because of his interest in civil liberties and indigent defense. Stephen has been a member of the NLG-NYC Executive Committee since 2021. Stephen is a recipient of Pace Law School’s Winifred Sobie Pasternack Civil Liberties Award. He is a Legal Observer Coordinator for NLG-Hudson Valley Mass Defense and was active in the creation of the Hudson Valley Satellite Chapter.
Aaron has been a member of the National Lawyers Guild since college, over forty years ago, and helped revive the dormant national committee which is now known as the Disability Justice Committee. Aaron also sits on the steering committee of the national Military Law Task Force. He has lived and practiced in New York City all of his professional life, and has strong friendships with members of National Conference of Black Lawyers, including its first National Director, who had him do legal research for his law firm beginning when he was in the City College Urban Legal Studies program, better known to many NLG members as "Haywood's program."
Elba has worked as a New York attorney for over twenty-five years. Early in her career, Elba worked as a litigator and appellate attorney in two private firms. Subsequently, she served as special counsel to the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund (currently LatinoJusticePRLDEF) and managed a solo practice. She also served as a Law Clerk to SDNY Judge Analisa Torres and Judge Laura Johnson and served as a court attorney-referee to Surrogate Judge Margarita Lopez-Torres. Elba is a past president of the Puerto Rican Bar Association and recipient of the PRBA’s 2011 Excellence in Advocacy Women’s Award. She is also a past deputy regional president of the Hispanic National Bar Association. A two-term past president of the NLG-NYC, she currently serves on the executive committee, the editorial board of the NYC Chapter Newsletter and the Mass Defense Committee. Elba received her B.A. from Cornell University and J.D. from Howard University School of Law.
Michelle Karshan has worked on Haiti issues for the past thirty years in a variety of contexts, including as a New York City radio journalist, a US-based solidarity activist, and based in Haiti’s National Palace from 1995 to 2004 where Karshan served as the Foreign Press Liaison for Presidents Jean-Bertrand Aristide, President Rene Preval and Aristide again during his second term. In 1981 Karshan graduated from the Paralegal Institute in NY, NY; serves as an expert witness in immigration court since 2001; and served as Adjunct Law Professor at Georgetown University Law Center (2008-2009). Co-founder and Vice President (2005-2023) of Health through Walls (HtW), a not-for-profit health care program in resource poor countries, Karshan served as its Haiti Coordinator (2009-2011) implementing a large-scale infectious disease screening and prevention program inside Haiti's National Penitentiary and other prisons, and was tasked with interfacing with governments and NGOs, and incorporated attorneys to advocate for detainees. Karshan served as Program Director of HtW Project ECHO (2022-2023) providing an international prison health care zoom platform program focused on HIV for prison health care staff and peer educator training for detained persons in three languages in a dozen countries internationally. Drawing on a vast background working with persons with criminal court cases, detainees, and their families, in 1996 Karshan founded Alternative Chance/Chans Altenativ, a self-help, reentry/advocacy program for persons deported to Haiti due to a criminal conviction and serves as its Executive Director. Alternative Chance is a co-petitioner before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). Karshan sat on the Advisory Board of Boston College’s Center for Human Rights and International Justice and its Post Deportation Human Rights Project.; co-authored several human rights reports; is widely cited in articles, reports and court decisions; and has presented at key forums on deportation and Haiti. Following the 2010 earthquake, at the request of attorney Jayne Fleming of Reed Smith, Karshan coordinated a campaign to develop new protocols for media covering gender-based sexual violence in Haiti.
Joel is the co-chair of the NLG Environmental Justice Committee (local and national), executive director of the New York Environmental Law & Justice Project and the Environmental Initiative for Haiti. Co-counsel in Benzman v. Whitman and EPA, in which the judge held Whitman’s statement that the air was safe in lower Manhattan after 9/11 to be egregious. Joel represents tenants, community gardens, public parks, indigenous people, workers’ groups on EJ issues from lower Manhattan to the Gulf Coast to Haiti.
Daniel is a retired Criminal Defense/Civil Rights Attorney. In 1967 he began practicing law and since 1968 has been a member of the NYC-NLG Chapter. From 1974-2001, he was an attorney member of the Attica Brothers legal team who sued Gov. Rockefeller and other state officials for the barbaric consequences of the 1971 Attica Massacre. Danny is a past president of the Chapter.
Michael O’Hora is a law student at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University, pursuing a dual-degree program. He began Bard College's MS in Environmental Policy program in Fall 2023 and aims to graduate from both institutions in May 2025. Michael's focus is on environmental law and policy, particularly in environmental justice and land use law. Michael has been a member of the NLG since he started his legal studies at Pace and currently serves on the NLG-Pace executive board. During his 1L summer, he interned for the City of Houston Legal Department in the Real Estate Division, assisting with affordable housing efforts and hurricane recovery programs. For his 2L summer, as a Haywood Burns fellow, he worked with the Environmental Justice Initiative / New York Environmental Law and Justice Project. He is committed to public interest law and is dedicated to advocating for equitable and sustainable environmental practices benefiting all communities.
Andrew Sawtelle is a staff attorney at the Drivers Resource Center of the Metropolitan Taxicab Board of Trade, where he represents taxi drivers in administrative hearings and assists drivers with civil and criminal legal issues. Andrew is a recent graduate of the City University of New York School of Law, where he joined the NLG as a member of the CUNY chapter and through it became a Legal Observer. He has been an active legal observer since the first anniversary of Occupy Wall Street in 2012, and has organized capacity building and training projects within the program. He worked with the chapter's Mass Defense Committee to oppose the creation of the NYPD's anti-protest Strategic Response Group in 2015. Prior to law school, he was a foreclosure prevention counselor in the Hudson Valley and helped found Nobody Leaves Mid-Hudson, a grassroots, multi-issue community organization based in Poughkeepsie.
Marwa Sayed Marwa is a 2L at CUNY Law. Prior to law school, she worked as an Americorps Legal Advocate with Greater Boston Legal Services and the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute where she advocated for people experiencing homelessness. Marwa also worked at the Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless helping create policy changes to keep people housed. This summer, she was an Initiative for a Representative First Amendment Fellow where she got to work on FOIA and First Amendment issues having to do with records of prisoners kept at CIA black sites overseas and Guantanamo. This summer, she will be working at the Center for Constitutional Rights as a part of the Ella Baker internship program. She is also a member of the Muslim Justice League, which seeks to demolish the policing and surveillance of Muslim, Black, and brown communities. Marwa’s interest in the law comes from growing up in a world shaped by the post-9/11 security state and she intends to work to prevent surveillance and protect privacy after law school. Marwa was a Legal Observer in Massachusetts for many years and serves as a Legal Observer in NYC as well. She is also on the board CUNY Law chapter of the NLG.
Ann has practiced law for 25 years on behalf of union members, specializing in divorce, housing and consumer law. She is a writer and activist who's been involved in feminist, labor, anti-nuclear, death penalty, and anti-imperialist causes over the years. She was the chapter's unpaid coordinator during our financial crisis of the mid-90's.
Franklin Siegel worked in the NLG National Office Collective, held leadership roles in several national NLG projects including the Puerto Rico Legal Project, was on the board of the NLG’s Grand Jury Project and co-chaired the national NLG’s International Committee during a prolific period of growth. He was the N.O. staff member who coordinated the filing of the national NLG’s lawsuit against the FBI, in which the Guild was represented by Rabinowitz, Boudin, Standard, Krinsky & Lieberman. He is a past president of the Chapter, and is currently a member of the NYC Mass Defense Committee. Franklin’s recent Chapter work includes organizing the early December webinar on the conflict in Gaza and the October 2022 CLE on the affirmative action cases pending in the U.S. Supreme Court (co-presented with the Society of American Law Teachers). He is working on getting an extensive collection of hard-copy chapter dinner journals digitized, as well as digitizing several decades of back issues of the chapter’s long-form newspaper, Blind Justice (anticipated completion summer-fall 2024). He has also kept the Chapter Executive Committee informed when counsel fees awards appear on public court dockets, so the Chapter can request members of the Chapter’s Floyd-BLM Affirmative Litigation Task Force to fulfill their donation pledges to the Chapter. In recent years Franklin had secured the meeting and dormitory facilities when the Chapter hosted the 2016 NLG Convention; organized a full day CLE in January 2017 on the coming Trump era (co-sponsored with CUNY Law and the Society of American Law Teachers); co-organized the June 2017 CLE “Defending Protesters in Criminal Court” with Sarah Kunstler and Susan Howard; and organized the October 2021 NLG Convention panel on the NLG’s representation of the Attica Brothers. He is Secretary of the board of The NLG-NYC Chapter Foundation. Franklin is a Distinguished Lecturer at CUNY School of Law, where he also directed the evening program from 2017 through the summer of 2023. (With a Legal Aid Support Staff shop steward, he arranged for SEIU-1199’s Education Fund to provide substantial tuition support for LAS support staff to attend CUNY Law’s evening program.) He will be one of the award recipients at the Society of American Law Teachers’ 50th Anniversary celebration in January 2024. He spent a decade in private practice, was a Staff Attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, became CCR’s Treasurer at a time of fiscal stress and served on its board for 18 years. He is one of the five class counsel in Handschu v. Special Services Division, coming into the case when he was a law student at Marty Stolar’s law collective.
Martin has been a lawyer since 1968 He was a member of the original New York Law Commune, a partner of Stolar, Alterman & Gulielmetti and, since 1987, has been in individual private practice. Starting in 1970, he has represented thousands of arrested demonstrators as part of the Mass Defense Committee including Black Panthers, civil rights activists, anti-war activists, welfare mothers, Young Lords, Vieques activists, RNC, OWS, Black Lives Matter and environmental activists, and just about everyone who comes within the scope of the NYC Chapter’s Mass Defense Committee. Other notable cases include The Camden 28, The Attica rebellion, assorted Grand Jury resisters, post-9/11 detainees, the 34th Street Subway bomb plot, and Handschu v. SSD, the now almost 52 year-old action regulating the activities of the NYPD’s investigations of political and religious activity. Marty has been part of the NLG since he began practicing law and has been President of the NYC Chapter for five terms. Marty is the current President of the NLG-NYC Chapter Foundation.

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

EC Login »