Darcy M. Meals

Darcy Meals serves as Director of Public Interest Programs for the College of Law and Deputy Director of the Center for Access to Justice. Meals is responsible for developing and overseeing the center’s programs and publications, overseeing the award-winning student Pro Bono Program and the Public Interest Law and Policy certificate program, and teaching law school courses through the center’s access to justice curriculum. Meals was the recipient of the 2022 Steven J. Kaminshine Faculty Award for Excellence in Service.

Meals holds an A.B. in public policy from Brown University and a J.D. from UCLA School of Law, where she graduated Order of the Coif. Before law school, Meals was the education coordinator at the Williams Institute, a think tank dedicated to sexual orientation and gender identity law and policy, where she oversaw the institute’s volunteers, edited reports and planned speaker series and fundraisers for lawyers, law students and the public.

At UCLA, Meals served as the editor-in-chief of the UCLA Law Review and was a member of the David J. Epstein Public Interest Law Program. She then clerked for Judge J. Frederick Motz of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland before joining O’Melveny & Myers LLP in Washington, D.C., where she specialized in white collar criminal defense, internal investigations and complex civil litigation. Meals also maintained an active pro bono practice, representing clients in deportation proceedings and a group of federal inmates seeking accommodation under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

She has written articles on immigration law and co-wrote an amicus brief in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt that was cited twice in Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s concurring opinion.

Meals is the co-chair elect of the AALS Section on Pro Bono and Access to Justice and the Secretary of the board of the Atlanta Bar Association’s Public Interest Law Section. She was a founding member of the Southern Center for Human Rights’s Leadership Council and sat for two years on the Equal Justice Works National Advisory Committee. Meals sits on the Young Alumni Participation Council for Brown University and is a member of the Board of Trustees for School Year Abroad.