Evangeline Sarda is Director of the Prosecution Clinic and Co-Director of the Criminal Justice Clinic at Boston College Law School. She has been teaching in both programs since joining the faculty in 1995. As part of the leadership offerings at Boston College, she has also developed workshops focused on justice and discernment, with themes including: Negotiating Meaning; Learning while Doing; and Mission, Purpose, Chaos and Creativity. In 2012, Sarda developed the annual Authority, Power and Justice: Leadership for Change Boston College Group Relations Conference Series. She also created a series of authority and leadership trainings that include consulting to small and large groups, hosting a social dreaming matrix, and role analysis and application. Her leadership work is international in scope, as she has worked in England, Peru, Italy, and China.
In 2001, Sarda received a Boston College Teaching Advising and Mentoring Grant to pursue work in group relations. Her aim was to develop an experiential approach to learning about the systemic dynamics of race and gender in the criminal justice system, from the place of one’s role within the system. A year later, her work led to her creating and teaching leadership courses at the law school.
Drawing from group relations theory and methodology, Sarda’s courses explore the conscious and unconscious dynamics of authority, leadership, social identity, followership, boundaries, role, and task within social systems and professional life generally, and more specifically within legal systems and the lawyering process.
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.
