Professional Journey

2000

Allyson began her career as a litigator in the San Francisco office of Latham & Watkins LLP. There, she learned how to be a zealous advocate and discovered how legal advocacy can serve a broader cause.

Although most of her clients were large corporations, Allyson also served on a legal team that represented young Indian victims of alleged labor and sex trafficking by a powerful Berkeley landlord. Their lawsuit detailed how the wealthy man preyed on girls in his home village, exploiting their poverty and low-caste status with false promises of education in America. Instead, he forced them to work for little pay in his restaurants and apartment buildings, where one victim died due to unsafe conditions.

The case of Doe v. Reddy‍ ‍was an early landmark human trafficking case in the United States. The defendant eventually paid $8.9 million to settle the civil suit. He was sentenced to eight years in prison on related criminal charges,

Through this tragic case, Allyson witnessed how a vast imbalance of power resulting from of ethnic, gender, and class prejudice can shatter the lives of those at the bottom of social hierarchies. She saw how profoundly culture can normalize dangerous ideas of human superiority and inferiority.

This case instilled in Allyson the conviction that we must not only uphold just laws, we must also strive to create more egalitarian cultures in which every person’s dignity is respected.

In 2010, Allyson began a teaching fellowship at Yale Law School. She supervised students in the Lowenstein Human Rights Law Clinic, a hands-on course in which students conduct fact-finding investigations and legal analysis for human rights organizations around the world.

At Yale, Allyson worked on a range of human rights issues in the U.S. and abroad while continuing to deepen her specialty in gender-based injustice. She oversaw investigations into forced pregnancy testing and expulsion of pregnant schoolgirls in Tanzania and child marriage in Sierra Leone. Like widow abuse in Uganda, these issues reflect patriarchal norms of social control over women’s sexual and reproductive lives, including their intimate decisions about marriage and family.

During these years, Allyson learned more about the feminist struggle to ensure that violence against women and other gender-based concerns are included within the protection of human rights. She was awakened to postcolonial critiques of the human rights movement and learned to think more critically about her own role as a white, western lawyer.

This season instilled in Allyson a conviction that human rights must always begin and continue at home in one’s own nation, culture, religion, and community. It reinforced the importance of local, culturally competent leadership and initiatives that center the voices of survivors.

For years, Allyson was keen to understand how Christians could disagree so profoundly on core issues of justice and ethics—on women’s rights, in particular. This led her to earn a Master of Divinity degree at Yale Divinity School, to further equip her for ethical reflection and faith-inspired advocacy.

YDS gave Allyson an opportunity to study to feminist theology, biblical interpretation, and pastoral care. It led to a summer of ministry with Rev. Marie Fortune, founder of FaithTrust Institute, who called the Church to a moral response to sexual violence and clergy abuse.

At YDS, Allyson co-chaired the Women’s Center and coordinated a symposium on campus sexual assault, just as that issue emerged into the national spotlight. Her op-ed writing began here, with three articles about the mishandling of high-profile rape allegations at her alma mater, Florida State University.

YDS was also a fertile environment for deepening her consciousness about racial injustice and for awakening to the crucial importance of intersectional approaches to justice and human rights.

Reading the Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray’s autobiography as part of a class on the Civil Rights Movement memorably impressed upon Allyson the vital importance of uniting struggles against racism, misogyny, homophobia, and all other forms of bigotry and discrimination.

In January 2017, Allyson stepped out in faith to pursue her longtime vision of founding a Christian organization that would defend human rights in the United States. Together with a team of fellow faith leaders concerned about rising Christian nationalism in the U.S., she launched Justice Revival.

Allyson served as executive director for seven and a half years, during which Justice Revival grew steadily as the team developed innovative programs to provide human rights education tailored to church and seminary audiences, and to convene an interfaith advocacy campaign in support of the Equal Rights Amendment.

Justice Revival also spoke out against racialized policing, the death penalty, and separation of immigrant families through its education and advocacy initiatives. It was an early supporter of the Christians Against Christian Nationalism campaign led by BJC, where Allyson now serves as a board member.

Through these experiences, Allyson found that there is a significant gender justice gap among Christian and interfaith movements for social justice. Too often, the injustices that impact women and girls are not part of the broader faith advocacy agenda. Although most Christians embrace human rights, too many are still ambivalent, tepid, or conflicted about women’s rights as equals.

Shortly after the Dobbs v. Jackson decision in 2022, Allyson published an award-winning essay in The Christian Century magazine, which argues that pregnant women have a right to bodily integrity which is not eclipsed during pregnancy, no matter how valuable fetal life may be. This led to her forthcoming book, If Women’s Lives Were Sacred: Christianity, Human Rights, and the Struggle for Equal Justice (T&T Clark/Bloomsbury, 2027).

Today, Allyson is a faith and gender justice specialist, drawing on two and a half decades of experience as a lawyer, advocate, scholar, and faith leader. She writes, speaks, teaches, and advocates on the liberating promise of the Christian message to advance women’s rights and gender equality.