Evangeline Sarda is Director of the Prosecution Clinic and Co-Director of the Criminal Legal Clinic at Boston College Law School. She has been teaching in both programs since joining the faculty in 1995. She also teaches Critical Race Theory and two leadership classes: Authority and Leadership in Professional Life, and Law, Leadership and Social Justice.
Since 2002, Sarda has pursued work in group relations and systems psychodynamic theory which led to her designing and teaching leadership courses at the law school. Her initial aim was to develop an experiential approach to learning about the systemic dynamics of race and gender in the criminal justice system, and has since expanded to exploring the ways in which the legal system is constructed to contain and manage societal anxieties. Her courses explore the conscious and unconscious dynamics of authority, leadership, power, social identity, followership, boundaries, role, and task within social systems and professional life generally, and more specifically within legal systems and the lawyering process.
As part of the leadership offerings at Boston College, she also developed annual workshops and group relations conferences with themes including: Intersectionality: Working in the Borders of our Relatedness and Dividedness; Race and Belonging in Organizational Life; Women’s Lives: Authority, Complexity, Intersectionality; Variations of Very Asian: A Group Relations Conference on Asian-American Authority; Leadership at the Boundaries. From 2012-2023, Sarda organized and developed the annual Authority, Power and Justice: Leadership for Change Boston College Group Relations Conference Series. She also created a series of trainings that include consulting to small and large groups, hosting a social dreaming matrix, and role analysis and application. From 2018-2021, Sarda was the faculty director of Leaders Entering and Advancing Public Service (LEAPS). Her leadership work includes work in England, Peru, Italy, France and China.
Sarda received her B.A. from Yale University and her J.D. from Columbia University, where she was a founding member of the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law and the executive editor of the Columbia Human Rights Law Review. After law school, she was an assistant district attorney in Massachusetts with the Middlesex County District Attorney's Office, working as one of the first designated domestic violence prosecutors in the MDAO’s newly created Domestic Violence Unit.
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