Staff
Roderic V.O. Boggs
Executive Director
Rod Boggs is the Washington Lawyers’ Committee’s Executive Director, a position he has held since 1971. As director, he has guided the Committee for virtually its entire life, developing and expanding its work to cover the wide range of civil rights matters for which it is well known.
Under his leadership, the Committee has grown from a two-lawyer staff with a relatively small docket of cases to its current staff of 28, including 16 attorneys, and a docket of over 100 active cases.
Rhonda Cunningham Holmes
Deputy Director
Rhonda Cunningham Holmes joined the Washington Lawyers' Committee as Deputy Director in October 2011.
Da’aga Hill Bowman
Director, Development & Communications
Ms. Bowman, a lawyer with experience in publishing, fundraising, and higher education administration, joined the Committee in 2002. As Director of Development and Communications, she is responsible for the Committee’s development functions, including individual giving, foundation and firm giving, and print and online communications.
Robert M. Bruskin
Senior Counsel
Robert (“Bob”) Bruskin joined the Committee as Senior Counsel in the Fall of 2006, and has actively litigated dozens of cases involving failure to design and construct properties to be accessible to people with disabilities, discrimination against families that use Housing Choice Vouchers to subsidize their rents, discrimination in providing equal access to voting to members of the community of people with disabilities, discrimination on the basis of race, and predatory lending.
Matthew K. Handley
Project Director, Equal Employment Opportunity Project
Matthew Handley directs the Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) Project at the Committee, where his practice focuses on discrimination, wage and hour, and family and medical leave act litigation in the private and federal sectors, including individual and class actions in state and federal courts.
For close to a decade, Mr. Handley has represented victims of corporate and government misconduct, focusing on individual and class actions on behalf of victims of civil and human rights abuses in a wide variety of areas. He is a long-time advocate for the rights of immigrants and workers who have suffered from discrimination and other mistreatment in their daily lives.
Prior to joining the Committee, Mr. Handley was a partner at the law firm of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll, where he represented foreign workers who had been trafficked and otherwise abused while employed by U.S. companies abroad, disability rights groups advocating for the availability of accessible housing, Indian residents suffering from groundwater pollution resulting from the malfeasance of an American chemical company, detainees unlawfully held by the U.S. government in Guantanamo Bay and a variety of other victims suffering from corporate and government wrongdoing.
Before joining Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll, Mr. Handley was an associate at the law firm of Covington & Burling, where – along with the Committee – he represented customers of Cracker Barrel restaurants in Arkansas and Mississippi who had been discriminated against on the basis of their race.
Prior to joining Covington & Burling, Mr. Handley was a law clerk for the Honorable William Wayne Justice, United States District Judge for the Western District of Texas.
Before becoming a lawyer, Mr. Handley was a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal, where he served for two years as a rural construction engineer.
Education
- JD, with high honors, University of Texas School of Law
- BSE, Princeton University
Bar Admissions
- District of Columbia
- New York
- US District Court for the District of Columbia
- US District Court for the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York
- US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit
Clerkship
- Honorable William Wayne Justice, United States District Judge for the Western District of Texas
Publications
- Why Crocodiles, Elephants, and American Citizens Should Prefer Foreign Courts: A Comparative Analysis of Standing to Sue, 21 REV. LITIG. 97 (2002).
- Combating Human Trafficking in Iraq: Adhikari v. Daoud, ABA International Law News, Volume 38, Number 1.
Philip Fornaci
Project Director, DC Prisoners’ Project
Phil Fornaci has led the DC Prisoners’ Project since it became a part of the Committee in 2006. He directs the Project’s ongoing litigation on behalf of DC prisoners and formerly incarcerated people on issues related to their conditions of confinement and related matters. He has advocated for improved medical care for DC prisoners, limits on population at the DC Jail, expanded rights for parole-eligible prisoners, and on a wide range of other matters affecting prisoners in DC jail facilities and in the federal Bureau of Prisons, as well as matters affecting parolees.
E. Elaine Gardner
Project Director, Disability Rights Project
Elaine Gardner has directed the Disability Rights Project at the Committee since 1996. She is a long-time advocate for the rights of people with disabilities, and has represented people with a broad spectrum of disabilities on a wide variety of disability rights issues, most notably access to public services, health care, and transportation. She has spearheaded a number of important disability rights class action lawsuits, most notably one against the Washington Area Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which secured greatly enhanced paratransit services for people with disabilities. She is an adjunct professor at the Columbus School of Law at Catholic University, where she teaches a course in the Legal Rights of People with Disabilities.
Deborah Golden
Staff Attorney, DC Prisoners’ Rights Project
Deborah Golden has been a Staff Attorney with the DC Prisoners’ Project since it became a part of the Washington Lawyers’ Committee in 2006. Her practice focuses on litigation of constitutional claims on behalf of prisoners in federal and state courts in several jurisdictions. She has also written extensively on issues related to the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) and its deleterious impact on the enforcement of constitutional rights.
Elinor Hart
Elinor Hart has served as the Coordinator of the Committee’s DC Public School’s Partnership Project since the summer of 2009. Her extensive experience with the project includes editing the program’s semi-annual newsletter, Partners Unlimited Bulletin Board, which she helped launch in 1997. She has also produced several videos and DVDs about the program.
Rochelle Jones
Chief Financial Officer
Rochelle Jones joined the Washington Lawyers’ Committee staff in 1996 as director of finance and administration. Ms. Jones assumed the position of chief financial officer in 2001. As CFO she is responsible for the finance and budgeting functions of the organization.
Richard J. Ritter
Senior Counsel
Richard J. Ritter is a consulting attorney for the Committee, specializing in bank and insurance redlining litigation, predatory lending, and public accommodation civil rights cases.
Laura E. Varela
Project Director, Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project
Laura Varela joined the Committee as the Director of the Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project in 2006, where she focuses on wage and hour class action litigation on behalf of immigrant workers. Since joining the Committee, she has also spearheaded legal challenges to anti-immigrant legislation and has litigated numerous cases involving illegal and abusive detention of immigrants and police misconduct toward immigrants. Ms. Varela is recognized as an expert on federal wage and hour law, and is a frequent lecturer on immigrant rights.
Megan K. Whyte
Project Director, Fair Housing Project
Megan K. Whyte joined the Committee as Director of the Fair Housing Project in 2010 and assumed leadership of its ongoing caseload involving harassment of tenants, failure to design and construct properties to be accessible to people with disabilities, discrimination on the basis of race, gender, national origin, and disability, discrimination against families that use Housing Choice Vouchers to subsidize their rents, discrimination in public accomodations, and police misconduct.
Kent Withycombe
Special Counsel, DC Public School Partnership Program
Kent joined the Committee in January 2012. He comes to the Committee from Dickstein Shapiro LLP, where he was a partner and had practiced as an insurance litigator on behalf of policyholders for more than 15 years. Prior to Dickstein Shapiro, Kent was a shareholder member for eight years in the law firm of Anderson Kill Olick & Oshinsky, P.C., where he also litigated insurance matters on behalf of policyholders in addition to other matters involving securities and construction disputes.
Marielle Macher
Skadden Fellow, Fair Housing Project
Marielle Macher joined the Committee in September 2012 as a Skadden Fellow. She has begun a new Committee initiative to provide representation to foreclosure rescue and loan modification scam victims in affirmative litigation seeking to recover monetary damages, injunctive relief, and/or title to foreclosure rescue scam victims’ homes.