First Wednesday Series: Taking White Supremacy to Court: The Charlottesville Case

Amy Spitalnick Related Seminars and Products

Executive Director

Integrity First America

Amy Spitalnick is the Executive Director of Integrity First for America, a nonpartisan  nonprofit organization dedicated to holding those accountable who threaten longstanding principles of our democracy – including our country’s commitment to civil rights and equal justice. Most notably, IFA is the organization supporting Sines v. Kessler, the lawsuit filed by a coalition of Charlottesville community members against the Nazis and white supremacists responsible for the violence.

Amy joins IFA with over a decade of experience in government, politics, and advocacy. She most recently served as Communications Director and Senior Policy Advisor to New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood. Amy previously served as an advisor and spokesperson for New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, and as Communications Director in the New York State Senate. She has also worked for a number of federal, state, and local campaigns and advocacy organizations. Amy was named a City & State 40 Under 40 Rising Star in 2013. She graduated from Tufts University.

Michael Bloch Related Seminars and Products

Counsel

Kaplan Hecker & Fink

Michael Bloch is Counsel at Kaplan Hecker & Fink. He is an experienced trial attorney who spent over seven years as a public defender at the Bronx Defenders and three years as a litigation associate at Williams & Connolly LLP before joining Kaplan Hecker.

At Bronx Defenders, Michael represented hundreds of clients charged with criminal matters at all stages of litigation.  He has tried more than a dozen felony and misdemeanor cases to verdict and earned an acquittal or dismissal of all criminal charges in all but one case. In the past four years, he has tried seven cases to jury verdict – as lead counsel on five of them – and earned a full acquittal on all of them. Michael was a supervisor in the Bronx Defenders Criminal Defense Practice, a member of the Homicide Practice Group, and previously served as a supervisor of the Investigations Practice. Michael has conducted numerous trainings on trial advocacy and criminal defense investigations and was a member of the 2019 faculty for Harvard Law School’s Trial Advocacy Workshop.

Michael served as a law clerk to the Honorable Chief Judge Helen Ginger Berrigan on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana and subsequently to the Honorable Diane P. Wood on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.

He is currently a member of the New York City Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Operations Committee and Mass Incarceration Task Force. His writings have appeared in the New York Times, USA Today and The Forward.

Jessica Phillips Related Seminars and Products

Partner

Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison, LLP

A partner in the Litigation Department, Jessica Phillips has litigated a variety of complex commercial cases in federal and state trial and appellate courts across the country. She has experience in a diverse array of practice areas, including employment law, contract law, business torts, securities fraud, constitutional law, defamation, healthcare and intellectual property. She has taken five cases to trial in courts around the country and has experience in California arbitrations.

Jessica currently represents individuals who were injured in the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in a lawsuit against 24 neo-Nazis, white supremacists and affiliated hate groups who organized and conspired to commit violence at the rally. Jessica also has extensive experience representing clients in appeals, including before the U.S. Supreme Court; she second-chaired Vance v. Ball State University, one of the most closely watched recent employment discrimination cases. She has also handled appeals before the New Hampshire Supreme Court, the Delaware Supreme Court, and the Second, Fourth, Sixth, Ninth, Eleventh and D.C. Circuit Courts of Appeal, clerked for The Honorable Joel Flaum on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and for The Honorable Samuel A. Alito, Jr. on the United States Supreme Court. As lead counsel, Jessica argued a pro bono ERISA case before Second Circuit.

John M. Geiringer Related Seminars and Products

Partner and Regulatory Section Leader, Barack Ferrazzano Financial Institutions Group; Co-Director, Center for National Security and Human Rights Law, Chicago-Kent College of Law

Barack Ferrazzano LLP, Chicago

As the Regulatory Section Leader of the Financial Institutions Group at Barack Ferrazzano law firm, John advises a wide variety of financial institutions around the country about the full spectrum of legal, regulatory, and supervisory issues that they face. He is a frequent speaker and author in the financial institutions area on issues surrounding banking regulations, examinations, and enforcement actions, as well as on cybersecurity. John devotes significant time to anti-money laundering, counter-terrorist financing, and related national security issues. In this regard, he lectures and advises institutions around the country, engages with relevant organizations, and has published on the subject.

John also teaches banking law, national security law, and Holocaust and the law at Chicago-Kent College of Law, and is the founding Co-Director of its Center for National Security and Human Rights Law.  He is the editor of Countering the Financing of Terrorism: Law and Policy, and is the co-editor of an upcoming treatise on legal issues surrounding the Holocaust. 

Along with Rabbi Asher Lopatin, he is the co-host of a podcast called A Rabbi and a Lawyer Walk Into a Bar.