Temple University Beasley School of Law Invites You to: Meet Temple Law’s Latina & Latinx Legal Academics

Professor Abreu is nationally known for her ability to make students understand and care about the tax system. She is a recipient of the 2017 Great Teacher Award from Temple University, the 2013 Murray F. Shusterman Award for excellence in teaching from the Temple Law Alumni Association, and the 2007 University Lindback award for distinguished teaching. She has been a visiting professor at a number of institutions, including the Harvard Law School and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and has taught Corporate Tax at the Yale Law School. She has been quoted in the tax column of the Wall Street Journal, has served as Secretary and Vice Chair, Publications, of the Tax Section of the American Bar Association, and is a frequent speaker at national and regional tax conferences.

Having specialized in foreign, comparative and international legal research, she has focused throughout her librarian career on the importance of preserving access to legal information from all jurisdictions. As law libraries face growing budget and space pressures, as collections carefully built over generations age in less-than-ideal conditions, and as conflicts and crises have endangered libraries around the world, unique and important material is being lost. She is equally interested in securing access to the increasing body of born-digital legal information that has only ever been available online, and which the originating organizations may not be concerned with preserving. She is dedicated to enhancing collaboration across law libraries to preserve historically important collections and secure access to legal information, and is a current board member of the Legal Information Preservation Alliance to advance those objectives.

Prior to joining Temple, she served as Associate Director for Collections and Operations at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School’s Biddle Law Library, where she was responsible for overseeing the collection and archives, facilitating library operations, selecting international and foreign law materials, providing international law reference services, and teaching specialized seminars on foreign and international legal research. Her contributions to the profession include a chapter in SOURCES OF STATE PRACTICE IN INTERNATIONAL LAW (2d ed. 2014); editing the Mexico and Chile sections of Foreign Law Guide; preparing research guides on topics including rule of law, international women’s rights, and League of Nations research; chairing committees of the American Association of Law Libraries’ Foreign, Comparative and International Law special interest section; and serving as Secretary/Treasurer for the American Society of International Law’s International Legal Research interest group.

In her role at the Institute of Law, Innovation & Technology (iLIT), Lydia designs programs to increase representation and accountability in the emerging field of public interest technology and supports coalition building and research around the human and civil rights implications of digital surveillance and other emerging technologies. Having co-founded the Diversity in Public Interest Law Project (DPIP) while she was a law student, Lydia now stewards DPIP’s mission to increase the accessibility of public interest law for students from historically excluded and/or marginalized backgrounds through research that fills data gaps, resource-creation that supports recruitment and retention of diverse attorneys, and information-sharing that increases understanding of and connects students to pathways to public interest law.

Lydia graduated from Temple University James E. Beasley School of Law. While a Temple law student, she was a Law & Public Policy Scholar; spent a semester at Temple’s Japan Campus; served as co-chair of the Student Public Interest Network’s Diversity and Inclusion Committee (SPIN), and as a representative for the Student Wellness Association (SWA) and the Latin American Law Students Association (LALSA); and founded Visual and Interactive Techniques for All Legal Learners (VITALL). Before law school, she worked as a paralegal for the Pennsylvania Farmworker Project of Philadelphia Legal Assistance.

Her scholarship, which has appeared or is forthcoming in law journals, such as the Columbia Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review, Boston University Law University, Minnesota Law Review, Columbia Law Review Forum, and Virginia Law Review Online, primarily centers on state responsibility for mass atrocity, critical approaches to public international law, and the carceral state, with a particular focus on Eighth Amendment jurisprudence. She is also pioneering a new genre of legal scholarship called Participatory Law Scholarship (PLS), which is written in collaboration with authors who have no formal legal training, but rather expertise in law’s injustice through lived experience. One of these works, Redeeming Justice, was awarded the 2022 Law and Society Association Article Prize. In 2024, the Virginia Law Review selected PLS as the theme of their Sixth Annual Symposium.

Recognized as an expert in criminal law and public international law, her writing and commentary have been featured in The Hill, Bloomberg News, Americas Quarterly, Scientific American, the Guardian, Just Security, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. She is currently a Special Advisor of the Latin American and Caribbean Law Council for the American Bar Association. From 2015 to 2019, she served as a Commissioner on the Pennsylvania Sentencing Commission, as an appointee of then Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf. She was appointed to co-chair the 2022 Annual Meeting for the American Society for International Law (ASIL) and is the current Chair of the AALS Section on International Human Rights. She has also testified at hearings before the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Philadelphia City Council and recently joined leading human rights experts as a co-author of the first law school textbook focused on domestic human rights in the U.S., Human Rights Advocacy in the United States (West, 2023).

Prior to joining the faculty at Temple Law, Professor López taught at Drexel Kline School of Law, where she was honored with the University President’s Civic Engagement Award for Faculty and Professional Staff, the Donna M. Murasko Teaching Award, and the inaugural Dean’s Research Fellowship. She has also clerked on the New Mexico Supreme Court and worked at the Open Society Justice Initiative, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Professor López received her B.A. in Sociology, Political Science, and International Studies from Northwestern University and her J.D. from the University of Texas, School of Law. She also has an LL.M. in French and European Law from Université Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne.

Professor Rangel-Medina graduated from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, where she was named an inaugural University of California Presidential Public Interest Law Fellow. She is an honors graduate from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where she attained three Bachelor of Arts degrees magna cum laude with Departmental Honors in English Literature, Women’s Studies, and Political Science: Public Policy & International Relations. She previously worked as a managing director at United for Respect and Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC United) advancing labor and employment advocacy campaigns and providing resources to low-wage workers.

In 2019, while still a student interning at the National Women’s Law Center, Professor Rivera-Calderón published a report with student co-authors, “We Are Not Invisible: Latina Girls, Mental Health, and Philadelphia Schools,” which inspired policy change efforts at the national, state, and local levels. In recognition of their law school work, Professor Rivera-Calderón was recognized as a National Jurist Law School Student of the Year Finalist and a Temple University Alumni Association 30 Under 30. Following law school, Professor Rivera-Calderón continued at the National Women’s Law Center through a Pride Law Fund fellowship, through which they focused on the educational experiences of LGBTQ+ students of color. Through this fellowship, they published an LGBTQ+ advocacy curriculum, “Brick by Brick,” which has been a resource to students nationwide.

Following a clerkship in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, Professor Rivera-Calderón joined civil rights organization Advancement Project in 2021 as the Right to Education Fellow and Staff Attorney. Through this role, Professor Rivera-Calderón focused on supporting youth organizing groups in developing a vision for the liberatory education students need today. Professor Rivera-Calderón developed a timeline, “From Control Toward Liberation: The Fight for Education Rights,” which has contributed to the organizing work of youth leaders nationwide. Professor Rivera-Calderón also contributed to the National Campaign for Police Free Schools’ work on abolitionist mental health in schools. During this time, they also served as an Adjunct Professor of Law at Temple. Professor Rivera-Calderón maintains an active volunteer and pro bono practice.