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Who We Are

 

 

Faculty

Cyn Yamashiro

Clinical Professor and Executive Director of the Center for Juvenile Law and Policy

J.D., Loyola Law School Los Angeles
B.A., University of California Los Angeles

Cyn Yamashiro is the director of the Center for Juvenile Law and Policy. Before joining the Loyola Law School faculty in 2004, he served as deputy public defender III with the Los Angeles County Public Defender's Office. During his 10 years with the Office, Yamashiro was a long cause felony trial attorney in the Los Angeles Criminal Division; deputy-in-charge with the Juvenile Division in Compton; and felony trial attorney at the LAX Courthouse in Los Angeles. Earlier in his legal career, Yamashiro worked with the San Diego County Public Defender's Office and with Minami, Lew & Tamaki in San Francisco. While in law school, he clerked for the International Labor Rights and Education Fund in Guatemala City and the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California.

Maureen Pacheco
Clinical Professor, Clinical Director of the Center for Juvenile Law and Policy

J.D., Georgetown Law School, magna cum laude

Order of the Coif

Participant: Criminal Justice Clinic

Associate Editor, Georgetown Law Review

Summer Associate, Cravath, Swaine and Moore

B.A., University of Michigan, magna cum laude

Sociology  Honors Program

Regents Scholar

 

After graduating from Georgetown Law in 1986, Maureen Pacheco spent a year and a half in practice with Mitchell, Silberberg and Knupp, before joining the Los Angeles County Public Defender's office.  During her twenty-two-year tenure there, she tried over fifty criminal jury trials and worked in the Mental Health Court and the Juvenile Appellate Division.  She served as the Juvenile Justice Legislative and Policy Advisory to the Public Defender for two years before coming to Loyola.  As a zealous juvenile-justice advocate, she has worked with the California Public Defenders Association as their primary juvenile-justice liaison, writing position papers and testifying as an expert witness before the California Legislature.  Ms. Pacheco sits on the board of the Pacific Juvenile Defender Center, where she cofounded and co-chairs the Amicus Committee.  A frequent lecturer on all aspects of juvenile justice, she has led seminars at the Juvenile Law Institute, Partnership Conference, CPDA Annual Delinquency Seminar, and Beyond the Bench. She has co-chaired the Mental Health Committee of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and currently sits on numerous local and statewide committees.  

 

Michael Smith
Director, Youth Justice Education Clinic

B.A. (Hons.) University of Sussex, United Kingdom
J.D. University of Southern California School of Law

Before joining the Loyola faculty, Michael Smith ran an education law practice representing low income and indigent clients, most of whom were wards of the delinquency or dependency courts.  His previous positions include Staff Attorney at Public Counsel Law Center, where he headed the education unit; and Director of the Special Education Project at The Alliance for Children’s Rights.  He has served Los Angeles Superior Court, Juvenile Division, as a court appointed education attorney since 2004.  Previously, Michael was also Adjunct Clinical Professor of Law at Southwestern Law School, supervising the Children’s Rights Clinic.  At law school Michael clerked at The Alliance for Children’s Rights as a Sidley Austin Public Interest Law Fellow.  Prior to law school, he taught elementary and middle school students in Baltimore and Compton public schools.

Jojo Liu
Associate Clinical Professor

A.B., Harvard College, magna cum laude
J.D., Columbia Law School

Prior to joining Loyola, Jojo Liu was a litigation associate at Morrison & Foerster, where she had a broad commercial litigation, white collar defense and compliance counseling practice. Previous to that, she was a Skadden Fellow at Legal Services for Children, representing indigent, disabled school children in suits against the New York City Board of Education.

Samantha Buckingham
Associate Clinical Professor

B.A., University of Virginia
J.D., Stanford Law School

Before joining Loyola's Center on Juvenile Law and Policy, Samantha Buckingham advocated on behalf of indigent clients for five years as a trial attorney at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia.  At PDS, she represented children charged as adults in criminal court with serious felonies including homicides and children facing delinquency in family court.  As a law student, Buckingham clerked for Legal Services for Children and the Federal Public Defender, both located in San Francisco.  Prior to that, she taught high school at the Maya Angelou School, a Washington D.C. charter high school for adjudicated and at-risk youth. 

Staff

Matthew Rosenbaum, LCSW

Social worker

M.S.W., California State University, Long Beach

M.A., Claremont University

B.A., University of California, Santa Cruz

 

Before comign to the CJLP, Matthew Rosenbaum worked for over six years in and around downtown Los Angeles in the fields of child welfare and domestic violence for Pico Union Family Preservation Network.  He also  worked as a Mental Health Officer for Doctors Without Borders in Eastern Chad for nearly nine months.  During his time in Chad, he created and ran a mental health/psychosocial clinic for victims of violence and displacement at an Internally Displaced Persons camp. In Guatemala, where he became fluent in Spanish, he worked with domestic violence survivors and their children at the only Domestic Violence shelter in the country, as well as helped abandoned Guatemalan children living on the streets and received a grant to create a shelter for boys. Prior to working as a Social Worker, he worked as an economist for the U.S. federal government and a public electric company. 

 

Efty Sharony
Social Worker

M.S.W., Columbia University
B.A., University of California, Santa Cruz

Efty Sharony is a social worker for the Center for Juvenile Law and Policy.  She has dedicated her career to working with incarcerated youth and adults since 1998.  She was a key player in the expansion and success of The Beat Within publication and program.  The Beat Within is a weekly publication of writing and art for and by incarcerated youth in the Bay Area.  Sharony recently started conducting workshops in LA’s Central Juvenile Hall.  She most recently worked as a forensic social worker in the Juvenile Rights Division of Legal Aid in Brooklyn.  During her Master's program she interned at a domestic violence shelter and also with the Office of the Appellate Defender, working with clients serving lengthy sentences.

Roxanne Hill
Assistant to the Director
Program Administrator

M.A., Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest
B.A., Loyola Marymount University

Roxanne Hill manages the day-to-day administrative, academic and executive needs of the Center for Juvenile Law and Policy.  After graduating from theological seminary, Hill worked as an HIV/AIDS chaplain at San Francisco General Hospital, and later on, as Family Services Coordinator at a pediatric HIV/AIDS organization in Los Angeles.  She also worked in Loyola Law School's Human Resources department for seven years prior to joining the staff at the Center for Juvenile Law and Policy.

Leilani Riehle

Manager of Operations

Ph.D., M.A., University of California, Los Angeles
B.A., Drew University, summa cum laude

Leilani Riehle is the Manager of Operations for the Center for Juvenile Law and Policy.  She holds a PhD in English from the University of California, Los Angeles, where she was a University Fellow for three years, a Chancellor's Fellow, a recipient of the Excellence in Teaching Award, and a recipient of the George Eliot Award for her dissertation.  As an adjunct professor, she has taught courses and seminars on Romantic literature, Victorian literature, Jane Austen, and popular culture.

Post-Graduate Fellow

Jamie Chon

J.D., University of California, Davis School of Law
B.A., George Washington University, Washington DC

Jamie Chon is a post-graduate fellow for the Center for Juvenile Law and Policy.  She has worked on criminal and social justice issues since college.  Most recently, she clerked for Judge Cheryl Johnson at the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.  As a law student at the University of California, Davis School of Law, she worked for a year in its Civil Rights Clinic, representing indigent clients on civil rights issues in federal court, and interned for the Orange County Public Defender’s Office.  During her undergraduate studies at the George Washington University, she pioneered a study on Korean Americans and substance abuse, and interned at DC Law Students in Court, where she assisted student attorneys in the representation of indigent clients on housing and criminal matters. 

 

Center for Juvenile Law and Policy Faculty Committee

Aprill, Ellen P., Associate Dean for Academic Programs, Professor of Law and John E. Anderson Chair in Tax Law
Sam Pillsbury, Professor of Law and J. Howard Ziemann Fellow
Christopher May, Professor of Law
Yxta M. Murray, Professor of Law
Alexandra Natapoff, Chair and Associate Professor of Law
Arnie Siegel, Clinical Professor of Law and Director of Legal Writing and Ethical Lawyering Program

Michael Waterstone,Associate Dean for Research and Academic Centers and J. Howard Ziemann Fellow and Professor of Law

Cyn Yamashiro, Clinical Professor and Executive Director

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