Elvia R. Arriola - Founder & Director of Women on the Border

Elvia R. Arriola is a Latina, feminist critical legal theorist. Her J.D. is from UC Berkeley and she has an M.A. in History from New York University. She was formerly a staff attorney with the National Headquarters of the American Civil Liberties Union and an Assistant Attorney General in the New York State Department of Law.

She began her law teaching career in 1991 at the University of Texas at Austin.

 Arriola taught civil rights, employment law, family law and feminist legal theory at the UT Law School from 1991-1999. In 1997, at a time when the University of Texas was under extensive public scrutiny over the impact of Hopwood v. Texas (5th Cir, 1996.) which abolished affirmative action in admissions, Professor Arriola developed a pedagogical experiment with her students enrolled in a course called Civil Rights Litigation that questioned the relationship between poor performance by students of color in standardized tests like the LSAT and distribution of education resources in the public schools.

Arriola has served as a visiting professor at St. Mary’s University and De Paul University in Chicago. As a 2001 Humanities Fellow at De Paul University she produced, in collaboration with the American Friends Service Committee, a conference on cross-border trade, the Mexican maquiladoras and the global economy. Arriola is currently an Associate Professor of Law at Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, Illinois.

Her books include: Tenure politics and the feminist scholar.(Why a Feminist Law Journal?): An article from: Columbia Journal of Gender and Law and Gender, sexuality and the law which you can order online from Amazon.com by clicking on the highlighted links.