Justine DeSilva is pursuing her JD at Berkeley Law School. Justine graduated from Stanford University with Honors in the Arts, a B.A. in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (with a Community Service distinction), and a minor in Creative Writing. During her undergraduate career, she studied abroad at the University of Cape Town in South Africa and the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. In 2017, she returned to the U.K. to pursue her MSc in Gender at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her dissertation focused on the connections between forced sterilization laws in United States history and disability abortion bans in the current U.S. sociopolitical climate, arguing that both movements exploit(ed) the disability community in order to regulate reproduction.

Prior to law school, Justine worked as a paralegal in New York City with a particular interest in pro bono outreach. Additionally, she volunteered as a rape crisis and domestic violence advocate through the Crime Victims Treatment Center and conducting research at The Empower Lab, a sexual and gender-based violence research lab affiliated with NYU. During the summer of 2022, Justine served as a Law Clerk at DV LEAP, a DC-based non-profit that represents domestic survivors at the appellate level.

Justine hopes to use her law degree to work with domestic violence and sexual assault survivors while contributing to sexual and gender-based violence research and policy development.