Shirin Sinnar 2004 Equal Justice Works Fellow Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights, San Francisco, CA Sponsor(s): Anonymous Primary Issue Area: Civil Rights/Civil Liberties Stanford University Law School, 2003

Shirin Sinnar works to counteract discrimination in the private sector against Muslims, Arabs, South Asians, and other communities affected by post-9/11 backlash. Her project is at the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, which has engaged in a range of post-9/11 civil rights advocacy. For example, it represents Hady Omar, an Egyptian immigrant detained and mistreated by the government in the fall of 2001. The organization has also represented individuals of Muslim, Middle Eastern, or South Asian backgrounds who were barred by airlines from flying, denied services, or discriminated against at work. In her project, Shirin is addressing the growing participation of private institutions in the antiterrorism campaign, focusing on instances where businesses, employers, and other private institutions have singled out people on the basis of national origin or religion for additional scrutiny or denial of services. She aims to use community outreach, media advocacy, and litigation to address this problem, with a primary focus on Northern California. Since September 2001, Shirin has organized a number of post-9/11 "know your rights" outreach campaigns and legal trainings in the local Muslim community through the Bay Area Association of Muslim Lawyers, a group she helped found and of which she currently serves as president. As an extern with the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, she evaluated post-9/11 civil rights outreach and co-coordinated a successful effort to pass a City Council resolution in Palo Alto, California, condemning the excesses of the USA Patriot Act. Last year, Shirin clerked for Judge Warren J. Ferguson of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Santa Ana, California.