Lavanya Prabhakar

Lavanya Prabhakar is a public interest fellow in the Oakland, CA office. Lavanya received her J.D. from Northwestern Pritzker School of Law in 2024.

Lavanya spent her time at Northwestern dedicated to civil rights, voting rights, and the power of community organizing. As a student attorney in Northwestern’s Bluhm Legal Clinic, she worked on multiple prison class actions, advocating for the proper enforcement of parole and mandatory release laws in the Deep South. She also helped represent community organizers dedicated to ensuring the safety of Chicago’s Black and brown young people. As as the Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Northwestern’s Journal of Law and Social Policy, Lavanya sought to foster community on campus through accessible and inclusive programming that involved community members from both Northwestern and the larger Chicago community. Inspired by her clinical work and classwork, much of Lavanya’s legal research focused on the intersection of movement lawyering and voting rights, which culminated in her published note, “Applying Movement Lawyering Principles to the Redistricting Movement.” During her summers, Lavanya worked on Capitol Hill on judicial nominations and legislative policy, and at a plaintiffs’ firm focused on civil rights class actions and environmental citizen suits.

Lavanya received her B.A. in International Relations and Economics from Boston University in 2019. Prior to law school, she worked in political research on political campaigns and in private industry.