ELVIA ROSALES ARRIOLA is a Latina, feminist critical legal theorist. She has a JD from UC Berkeley and an MA in American History from NYU. She is a former ACLU Karpatkin Fellow (1983-84) and Assistant Attorney General in the Civil Rights Bureau of the New York State Department of Law (1986-1990).

Arriola first became a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin where she taught civil rights, employment and family law and writing seminars on gender, sexuality and the law.  She is proud of a teaching project she conducted with her students in 1997-1998 as a response to the controversies surrounding the use of affirmative action in law school admissions. The Austin Schools Project responded to Hopwood v. Texas (5th Cir, 1996.) by demonstrating credible evidence in a series of research papers written by law students and edited by then assistant professor Arriola, that linked systemic inequality in the distribution of books, materials, advanced courses and teaching experience throughout Texas schools.  The inequities were played out in subsequent weaker student performance on Texas standardized tests

Arriola credits her interest in exploring the impact of NAFTA on working women and their families at the border to her involvement as a founding member of the Latina/Latino Critical Legal Theory conferences (LatCrit). Her scholarship on the issues of gender in the global economy were critical to the founding of this project, Women on the Border.  Arriola received Lat Crit’s Critical Pioneer Award n 2018.

Arriola is Professor Emerita of Law from Northern Illinois University (NIU), DeKalb, Illinois. At NIU she taught constitutional law, family law, gender,  sexuality and the law, civil rights litigation and a research seminar that grew out of her work with women on the Mexican border — Women, Law and the Global Economy.

Arriola has performed pro bono legal work in Texas for RAICES at the Karnes Family Immigration Detention center, Justice for Our Neighbors–Austin   and for the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law.

Click here to view list of Scholarly Publications by Elvia R. Arriola, including Amor y Esperanza: A Latina Lesbian Becomes a Law Professor (Journal of Legal Education.  Arriola recently published with Virginia Raymond, Ph.D.,  a criticism of the government’s reliance on for-profit corporations to operate immigration detention centers.   See “Migrants Resist Systemic Discrimination and Dehumanization in For-Profit Detention Center.”