Shawna L. Parks is the Co-Director of Litigation at Disability Rights Advocates. As the Co-Director of Litigation at DRA, Shawna takes a directing role in the organization's impact litigation.
Shawna has worked extensively on high-impact cases affecting the rights of people with disabilities. These include cases regarding the rights of people with disabilities in the criminal and juvenile justice systems, as well as a wide variety of cases addressing access to government programs and services, such as the court system, educational institutions, and government benefits. Her work in this area has also encompassed cases addressing housing and homelessness for people with disabilities, and other issues directed at the needs of very low income people with disabilities. She also has extensive experience on a wide variety of civil rights matters, including Constitutional claims and fee shifting in civil rights cases.
From 2005 through 2012 Shawna was with the Disability Rights Legal Center in Los Angeles, where she was most recently the Legal Director. In addition to her litigation responsibilities there, from 2007-2012 Shawna was an Adjunct Professor at Loyola Law School where she co-taught Disability Rights and Special Education Law, and supervised the DRLC's litigation externship program.
Shawna began her legal career as a legal assistant with Disability Rights Advocates in 1994 and returned as a fellow and then staff attorney from 2000 – 2003. From 2003 to 2004 she was also an associate attorney at the civil rights law firm of Schonbrun DeSimone Seplow Harris Hoffman & Harrison in Los Angeles, where she worked on employment discrimination matters, including race and sex discrimination.
Shawna has twice been named an Attorney of the Year by California Lawyer Magazine. In 2011 California Lawyer named her an attorney of the year in the area of juvenile law for her work in 2010 on a landmark case addressing systemic education reform in Los Angeles' largest juvenile detention camp. In 2013 she received the California Lawyer award in the area of disability law for her work on a precedent setting case addressing the needs of people with disabilities in Los Angeles’ large scale disaster plans. Shawna has twice been named one of the Top 100 Women Litigators in California by the Daily Journal (in 2010 and 2012), and was named a Southern California Rising Star by Superlawyers Magazine for 2006-2009.
Shawna is a 1995 graduate of U.C. Berkeley, and a 1999 graduate of Boalt Hall School of Law at U.C. Berkeley, where she was a Notes and Comments editor for the California Law Review, and member of the Task Force on Public Interest Law. She was also a Fulbright Fellow in Budapest, Hungary from 1999 to 2000.