Evangeline Sarda

Evangeline Sarda is Director of the Prosecution Clinic and Co-Director of the Criminal Justice Clinic. She has been teaching in both programs since joining the faculty in 1995.

In 2001, she received a Boston College Teaching Advising and Mentoring (TAM) Grant to pursue work in the field of Group Relations. Her aim was to develop an experiential approach to learning about the systemic dynamics of race and gender in the criminal justice system from the place of one’s role within the system. A year later, her work led to her creating and teaching leadership courses at the law school. Drawing from group relations theory and methodology, the courses explore the conscious and unconscious dynamics of authority, leadership, social identity, followership, boundaries, role, and task within social systems and professional life generally, and more specifically within legal systems and the lawyering process. She also developed an experiential course that links Leadership and Social Justice where students learn through experience about the overt and covert dynamics of social justice work.

As part of the leadership offerings at Boston College, she has also organized and developed a series of leadership workshops which focus on justice and discernment, with past themes including: Negotiating Meaning; Learning while Doing; and Mission, Purpose, Chaos and Creativity. In 2012, she developed the annual Authority, Power and Justice: Leadership for Change Boston College Group Relations Conference Series which takes place each spring. She directed the first five conferences and is now focused on developing a diverse group of consultants and directors to continue the series. She has also organized and developed a series of authority and leadership trainings which include consulting to small and large groups, hosting a Social Dreaming Matrix, and role analysis and application.Her leadership work is international in scope as she has worked in England, Peru, Italy and will soon work in China.

Professor Sarda received her B.A. from Yale University and her J.D. from Columbia Law School, where she was a founding member of the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law and the Executive Editor of the Columbia Human Rights Law Review. After law school, she was an assistant district attorney in Massachusetts with the Middlesex County District Attorney's Office, working as one of the first designated domestic violence prosecutors in the MDAO’s newly created Domestic Violence Unit. Past courses include: Introduction to Lawyering and Professional Responsibility; Law and Literature; Semester in Practice Public Interest; Advanced Prosecution Clinic; and Authority, Identity and the Psychodynamics of Legal Systems.