Meet the Panelists: 2025 Vermont Law Review Symposium

Professor Siu Tip Lam came to Vermont Law and Graduate School from the Massachusetts Attorney General Office, where she was an assistant attorney general in the Environmental Protection Division for 11 years. During her tenure there, she enforced state environmental laws and litigated throughout the Massachusetts court system, including the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Prior to that, she practiced law with the Boston firm of Brown, Rudnick, Freed & Gesmer as a litigation associate. She graduated from Harvard-Radcliffe College with a bachelor’s degree in East Asian Studies and received her JD from Northeastern University Law School. She speaks Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese and came to the United States from Hong Kong as a child.

Ryan is Deputy Solicitor General with the Vermont Attorney General’s Office. Ryan’s work involves representing Vermont in appellate courts including the Vermont Supreme Court and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals and litigating matters with complex constitutional issues. Ryan also assists in representing Vermont in multi-state litigation against the Federal government. Prior to becoming Deputy Solicitor General, Ryan was an Assistant Attorney General in the Environmental Protection Division of the Vermont Attorney General’s Office. Ryan also spent several years in private practice and clerked for the Vermont Superior Court, Environmental Division. Ryan is a 2013 VLGS graduate.

Apratim Vidyarthi is a litigation associate in the New York office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. His practice focuses on appellate and constitutional law, including First Amendment litigation and the media, entertainment, and technology industries. Among his matters, has represents a large technology company in First Amendment litigation against a government data sharing law; and currently represents a reporting organization in a high-profile defamation/free speech lawsuit. Apratim maintains a robust pro bono practice, focusing on First Amendment, Second Amendment, constitutional policing, Executive power, and Equal Protection issues. Apratim has filed amicus briefs at the Supreme Court in Chiles v. Salazar, Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, Gonzalez v. Trevino, and Hungary v. Simon. Apratim earned his JD cum laude in 2022 from the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to law school, Apratim worked at Deloitte Consulting in their technology consulting group.

Sam Abel-Palmer is the Executive Director of Legal Services Vermont, Vermont’s LSC grantee, a position he has held since 2016. He previously served as Director of Intake for Vermont Legal Aid, as a staff attorney in Vermont Legal Aid’s Disability Law Project, and as a civil rights investigator with the Vermont Human Rights Commission. He is a member of the Vermont Board of Bar Examiners, and of the NLADA Civil Council.  In a previous lifetime, he taught theater history and dramatic literature at DePauw University, Dartmouth College, and the University of Vermont.

Michael Hurley is Government Affairs Counsel at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), where he works on legislative and regulatory issues affecting free speech and academic freedom in higher education. He advocates for laws that expand and protect expressive rights and opposes laws that restrict them. This is Michael’s second tenure at FIRE, where he previously served as a Legislative & Faculty Program Associate. Prior to his time at FIRE, Michael worked as a research analyst for a political consulting firm during the 2020 election cycle.

Michael earned his JD, cum laude, from the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School and holds a bachelor’s degree in World Politics from The Ohio State University.

Anna F. Connolly joined the faculty of Vermont Law School in July 2021. Prior to that, she was an attorney at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, LLP where her practice focused on international and domestic commercial litigation as well as pro bono matters. She has significant experience in cross-border disputes, securities litigation, antitrust, and representing sovereign governments.

She has won numerous awards for her pro bono work, including civil rights and immigration matters, as well as work on behalf of survivors of domestic violence and sex trafficking. She was named a “Rising Star – The Top Women” by Super Lawyers in 2018. Professor Connolly served as a law clerk to the Honorable Raymond J. Lohier, Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and to the Honorable Cathy Seibel of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

She received a JD degree from Columbia University School of Law, where she was a James Kent Scholar and an editor of the Columbia Law Review. She received an undergraduate degree, magna cum laude, from Dartmouth College.

Rhiannon Hamam is a graduate of the University of Texas School of Law. Her first lawyer job was as a public defender in rural south Texas. She also worked as a mitigation specialist on capital habeas cases, and later returned to public defense, this time in Austin. She is currently the Supervising Attorney in the Mithoff Pro Bono Program at the University of Texas School of Law. She is a co-host of the 5-4 podcast. Outside of lawyering, Rhiannon is a community organizer in the movement for Palestinian liberation.

Michael Liroff graduated from Fordham Law School in 2014. He worked as an intern under Judge Shira Sheindlin in the Southern District of New York, as an associate at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP, and as advisor and general counsel to the political action committee Mobilize America at its founding. Outside the legal industry, Michael worked as a teacher and as an organizer on Barack Obama’s 2008 Presidential campaign.

Emily Gould brings many decades of practice as an attorney and ADR professional to her current consultancy work on two continents.  A former criminal prosecutor and agency general counsel, in the United States, she is the founder of a multi-racial leadership development company, NextGen Leadership that consults to law firms, legal systems and international NGO’s on the topic of trauma-informed leadership. In Rwanda, she supports a local Peace Center as co-director of African Peace Partners, a U.S. non-profit, and also serves as a law reform consultant to the Rwandan Justice Sector on the topic of trauma-informed restorative justice. 

In her legal career, Gould served as an Assistant District Attorney for Middlesex County, MA, director of the Medicaid Fraud Control Unit in the Vermont Office of the Attorney General, and general counsel to the Vermont Agency of Agriculture.  She has served as an assistant panel member of the Vermont Board of Professional Responsibility, and is a past section chair of the Association for Conflict Resolution and Dispute Resolution Section of the Vermont Bar Association. 

Sam Brakarsh is a theatre maker, policy advocate, and facilitator whose work bridges law, health, and the arts. He currently chairs the Pan-African Network on Artistic Freedom Summit and has served as the Africa Regional Representative for Artists at Risk Connection (ARC) and PEN America, and coordinated the AMANI: Creative Defense Network. Sam has led initiatives to reform censorship legislation in Sub-Saharan Africa, established networks of artist residencies, and coordinated emergency responses for artists prosecuted for their work. Additionally, he co-founded the Chikukwa Research Trust and Culture Centre in Zimbabwe and serves on the board of Savanna Arts Trust. As well as a published writer and actor, Sam is a Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) practitioner, in which he has created TO networks and led programs across the globe to change laws through participatory dialogue. Sam is recognised as a Dalai Lama Global Fellow and holds degrees from Yale and Oxford University.

Adaobi Egboka is the director, Africa Initiatives at the Cyrus R. Vance Center for International Justice, a non-profit program of the New York City Bar Association that promotes global justice by engaging lawyers across borders to support civil society and ethical, legal practice. She directs the Vance Center’s programmatic activities in Africa, working on projects across all four of its practice areas with a focus on key rule of law and human rights issues, and leads organization-wide efforts to promote and strengthen pro bono practice in selected African countries through special initiatives and strategic partnerships. She is a human rights lawyer with over 18 years of experience in access to justice, good governance, and the rule of law issues.

Lisa Sidambe is a regional researcher at Freemuse. She monitors and documents artistic freedom trends and developments, covering 46 African countries. As a consultant human rights researcher and development practitioner, she has worked on various projects related to artistic freedom, decent work, governance for culture, and international cultural cooperation. Lisa is the founder of Canvas of My Identity, an initiative that employs mixed media visual art to engage post-conflict narrations of contested spaces, contested discourses and contested identities.  A Mandela Rhodes Scholar, Canon Collins Scholar, Beit Scholar and Sir John Monash Medallist, Lisa holds a summa cum laude honours in Philosophy and International Studies from Monash University, a master’s in Conflict, Development and Security from the University of Leeds, and is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Johannesburg. She has also studied advanced human rights, public law, cultural project management, global governance and cultural diplomacy. 

Muleta Kapatiso is an activist, lawyer and development practitioner. His experience spans from governance and human rights project advisory, research and implementation, civil and criminal dispute resolution, legislative and policy reform, strategic partnerships and advocacy, artistic freedoms, election monitoring and observation, child rights, rapid response and social movement building. He supports various organisations and practices law an Attorney with a Lusaka based Law firm.

Muleta is the founder of GRASA, an organisation promoting economic, cultural and social rights. He holds an LLB and master of Laws in Constitutional and Administrative Laws (LLM) and Postgraduate qualification for practicing law in the Zambian Courts.

Benjamin C. Varadi joined the Vermont Law and Graduate School community in 2021. His current research explores the intersections of emerging industry regulation and triple-bottom-line considerations, with a particular focus on cannabis and other vice industries. He teaches business, ethics, and agricultural law courses.

He was previously a partner at a New Orleans law firm, a research fellow at the Tulane Center for Intellectual Property Law and Culture, managing attorney of the Common Ground Relief Legal Clinic, and a lecturer at the Loyola University New Orleans College of Law Technology and Legal Innovation Clinic. His contributions as a practitioner have been recognized with the New Orleans City Business “Leadership in Law” Award, and he has twice been selected as a SuperLawyers “Rising Star.”  

Esha Bhandari is deputy director of the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, where she works on litigation and advocacy to protect freedom of expression and privacy rights in the digital age. She also focuses on the impact of big data and artificial intelligence on civil liberties. She has litigated cases including Sandvig v. Barr, a First Amendment challenge to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act on behalf of online discrimination researchers, Alasaad v. Wolf, a constitutional challenge to suspicionless electronic device searches at the U.S. border, and Guan v. Mayorkas, in which she represents journalists questioned about their work by border officers. She argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in United States v. Hansen, a case that significantly narrowed a federal law that, on its face, criminalized First Amendment-protected speech about immigration. Esha is an adjunct professor of Clinical Law at New York University School of Law, where she co-teaches the Technology, Law, and Policy Clinic.

Josephine Wolff is a professor of cybersecurity policy at The Fletcher School at Tufts University. Her research interests include liability for cybersecurity incidents, cyber-insurance, government responses to cyberattacks, and the economics of information security. She is the author of two books: “You’ll See This Message When It Is Too Late: The Legal and Economic Aftermath of Cybersecurity Breaches” (MIT Press, 2018) and “Cyberinsurance Policy: Rethinking Risk in an Age of Ransomware, Computer Fraud, Data Breaches, and Cyberattacks” (MIT Press, 2022). Her writing on cybersecurity has also appeared in the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, Slate, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and Wired. Prior to joining Fletcher, she was an assistant professor of public policy and computing security at the Rochester Institute of Technology and a fellow at the New America Cybersecurity Initiative and Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.

John Coleman joined FIRE after a distinguished career in the public sector. For over six years John served as counsel for the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, assisting the Committee on legal and constitutional policy issues, including those involving First Amendment freedoms. He also worked in the legal departments of two federal agencies before joining state government as a senior policy advisor in the South Dakota Office of the Governor. John earned his bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Mary Washington and his JD from American University Washington College of Law.

Ilan Kogan is an associate in Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz’s Litigation Department.  Ilan received his JD from Yale Law School, where he served as an Editor of the Yale Law Journal. He completed his MBA at Harvard Business School, where he enrolled under the 2+2 program and graduated as a Baker Scholar. He also holds an MSc in Statistics from the University of Toronto and a BBA from the Schulich School of Business at York University. Prior to joining Wachtell, Ilan worked at the United Nations Executive Office of the Secretary General, Facebook’s Oversight Board, and McKinsey & Company. He has extensive experience with artificial-intelligence technology and policy, including as an expert witness at the Canadian House of Commons.