Margaret Russell

Margaret Russell has been a member of the Santa Clara University School of Law faculty since 1990, and is affiliated with the University’s Center for Social Justice & Public Service, the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, and the Center for Multicultural Learning. She has been honored for her contributions to student life at Santa Clara by the Asian Pacific Law Students Association and the Black Law Students Association. In 1991, she traveled to South Africa with a delegation of legal scholars to provide consultation on constitution-drafting for the post-apartheid transition.

Prior to joining the Santa Clara Law faculty, Professor Russell was a fellow at the public interest firm Public Advocates, Inc., a law firm in San Francisco. She served as the director of Public Interest Programs and as the acting assistant dean of student affairs at Stanford University, and also clerked for the Honorable James E. Doyle of the U.S. District Court in Madison, Wisconsin.

In 2020, as the first Mesa Refuge Neighborhood Fellow, she wrote about the Ohlone land on which the Santa Clara Mission and Santa Clara University sit. Her writing formed part of a report with recommendations to acknowledge the Mission’s past with respect to Ohlone erasure and to honor Ohlone history and culture on the university campus.

Margaret served as a trustee of the Oakland Museum, participated as a founding board member of the Equal Justice Society and Community Legal Services of East Palo Alto, and was appointed to Vice President of the board for the National ACLU, a position she held for ten years. She also chaired the Northern California chapter of the ACLU.

Margaret’s writings are central to the social justice priorities that Mesa Refuge seeks to uphold. She delves into issues of race, justice, and reconciliation, including important historical research on forgotten cases during the Jim Crow era as well as ways in which Santa Clara University can honor the region’s indigenous Ohlone peoples.

She holds a B.A. cum laude from Princeton University and a J.D. and J.S.M. from Stanford Law School.