Introducing Guest Blogger Chaumtoli Huq

This week, we are fortunate to have Chaumtoli Huq contributing to the blog.  Chaumtoli is an Associate Professor of Law at CUNY School of Law and the founder/Editor of Law@theMargins, an innovative law and media non-profit focused on law and social justice.  At CUNY, she teaches Contracts, Labor Law, Lawyering, and will co-direct the Workers’ Rights Clinic in the Fall.

Chaumtoli has devoted her entire professional career to public service focusing on issues impacting low-income New Yorkers, workers in Bangladesh, and human rights issue related to South Asia. In 2014, she was appointed as the General Counsel for Litigation for the New York City Office of the Public Advocate, becoming then the highest-ranking Bangladeshi-American in New York City government, for which she received a New American Heroes award from the New American Leaders Project.  Along with holding leadership roles at Legal Services of NYC and MFY Legal Services, she also served as Director of the first South Asian Workers’ Rights Project at the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, as a Skadden Fellow, and as the first staff attorney to the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, a multi-ethnic, immigrant and worker led labor organization.   In 2019, she was awarded the Access to Justice Leadership Award by the South Asian Bar Association of New York, and in 2020 was the Daynard Public Interest Visiting Fellowship awarded to nationally recognized public interest leaders.  She has twice been invited as a keynote speaker at the Princeton Prize in Racial Relations Symposium in 2016 and 2017.  She regularly conducts trainings on diversity, equity and inclusion for legal professionals and judges.

Chaumtoli is a contributor to an edited volume titled, Labor, Global Supply Chains and the Garment Industry in South Asia the anthology Voices of Resistance: Muslim Women on War, Faith and Sexuality (Ed. Sarah Husain; Seal Press 2006), author of, The War on Terror on Muslim Women and Girls: Forging Transformative Solidarities (Scholar and Feminist Online), co-author of Laying the Groundwork for Post 9-11 Alliances: Reflections Ten Years Later on Desis and Organizing (Asian American Literary Review, Volume 2, Issue 1.5, Fall 2011), and has authored Op-Eds in Al Jazeera, Huffington Post and Daily Star, the largest English daily in Bangladesh.

You can follow her on Twitter and follow Law@theMargins there.

We are grateful to Chaumtoli for taking the time to share her ideas with us and we look forward to her posts!