Center Scholars

Lillian Giles is a student at UC Berkeley School of Law. She holds a B.A. in Political Science and French Studies from Wake Forest University. While at Wake Forest, she completed a political science thesis on morality in U.S. asylum policy, did research on Tunisian immigration policy, and completed a legislative internship at the U.S. House of Representatives, focusing on foreign affairs. Before coming to Berkeley, Lillian also worked as an immigration paralegal at a non-profit organization in New York. She initially focused on family-based immigration cases, but shifted to primarily assist new arrivals with asylum and work permit applications. Lillian is excited to learn more about the intersection between international human rights and immigration policy. She looks forward to engaging in this work with the HRC.

Evie Schumann is a first-year student at UC Berkeley School of Law interested in the intersection of health and human rights, particularly in humanitarian settings. Before Berkeley, she worked on international peace and security projects at Carnegie Corporation of New York, a grantmaking foundation. Prior to that, she served as Policy Fellow at the U.S. Agency for International Development in Washington, D.C., supporting family planning and reproductive health programs globally. Evie holds a B.A. in Global Affairs from Yale University, where she completed a capstone project researching gender and violent extremism in the Sahel. She looks forward to engaging with the Human Rights Center throughout her time in law school.

Anchita Dasgupta is a first-year law student at Berkeley Law, from Kolkata, India. She holds an A.B. in History and Middle East Studies from Brown University, where she wrote an honors
thesis on how legally disenfranchised and occupied peoples in the Middle East and South Asia exercise agency through their “occupiers’ law.” Anchita also earned an MPhil in Law from St. Catherine’s College, University of Oxford. Her masters’ dissertation, situated at the intersection of critical legal history and Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), explored how Global South resistance movements shaped contemporary international legal norms. Before law school, Anchita worked as a legal advocacy fellow with a non-profit organization in the Middle East, advocating for the release of political prisoners to UN special procedures. In addition to the Middle East, Anchita has also written and advocated extensively on human rights issues in South Asia, and has published her work in academic and other publications. At Berkeley Law, Anchita is an Articles Editor for the Berkeley Journal of International Law and serves on the boards of the International Law Society, International Arbitration Association at Berkeley Law, and Women+ of Color Collective. She is a pro-bono volunteer at the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office, and pro-bono student leader for the International Human Rights Workshop. She is a researcher at the Human Rights Center’s Investigations Lab and the Political Conflict, Gender, and People’s Rights Initiative at the Berkeley Center for Race and Gender. Anchita was selected as a Miller-ASIL fellow from Berkeley Law for 2024-2025. Anchita will be working as a Legal Intern at the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals in the Hague during her 1L summer. Through her work bridging critical scholarship and practice of international law, Anchita hopes to continue to advance the mission of the HRC and expand the access of justice to marginalized communities internationally.