Meet Our Executive Director

Allison began her legal services career as an Equal Justice Works Fellow with the newly established South Carolina office of Root & Rebound. Her fellowship focused on family reunification for formerly incarcerated individuals, and she also contributed to the expansion and management of the new team.

 

After completing the two-year fellowship, she stayed on as a Staff Attorney and soon became Legal Services Director, primarily overseeing client services, managing litigation, and building a parole project. Prior to her fellowship, Allison clerked for the Honorable Henry F. Floyd of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. In 2023, she had her first opportunity to argue before that Court after winning a Certificate of Appealability in a habeas case.

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Allison received her J.D. (magna cum laude, Order of the Coif) and an LL.M. in International Human Rights Law with honors from Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law in 2019. During law school, she interned for Chicago Legal Advocacy for Incarcerated Mothers at Cabrini Green Legal Aid and was a five-semester clinic student.

 

She worked with the Bluhm Legal Clinic’s Children and Family Justice Center and the MacArthur Justice Center’s Jail Suicide and Prisoners’ Rights clinic teams, each for a full academic year, and also participated in the International Human Rights Clinic for an additional semester.

 

Allison continued with the MacArthur Justice Center as a summer intern, working on prisoners’ rights cases and other civil rights litigation, including a class action challenging the constitutionality of Chicago’s gang database. She also served as a solitary confinement research assistant for the MacArthur Justice Center Appellate Program.

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During her LL.M. year, Allison explored the intersection of criminal legal systems and civil rights from an international perspective. She conducted senior research on the detention of individuals convicted by international criminal tribunals and externed for the Governance and Justice Group, primarily working on a Justice Audit of Somalia’s criminal legal system.

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Allison received her Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and Mandarin Chinese from Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, after which she was a Fulbright Scholar conducting public health research in China.