Thomas Giovanni & Laura K. Abel
Laura K. Abel is Acting Co-Director of the Justice Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, where she has worked since 1999. Her work is aimed at enhancing the ability of low-income families and individuals to obtain legal counsel and access to the courts, and at securing the freedom of nonprofit organizations to exercise their First Amendment rights in the course of assisting low-income communities. Prior to joining the Brennan Center, Ms. Abel was a Gibbons Fellow at Gibbons, Del Deo, Dolan, Griffinger & Vecchione, P.C. where she litigated on behalf of low-income people in a wide variety of cases. In preceding years, she was a staff attorney fellow for the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project and clerked for Judge Robert Carter of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Ms. Abel received her J.D. from Yale Law School in 1994.
Thomas Giovanni joined the Brennan Center for Justice after nearly a decade of providing direct services as a Staff Attorney and then a Supervising Attorney at the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem, seeking a platform from which to address the systemic policy barriers to the delivery of indigent defense services. He is Director of the Community-Oriented Defender Network, a network of over 50 defender offices and related service providers, united in the goal of improving the lives of their indigent clients and the communities in which they live through the provision of community-oriented defense services.