Amaris Montes is the Associate Director of Public Interest Counseling. Prior to joining UCLA School of Law, Amaris spent five years doing trial and appellate litigation on behalf of incarcerated people in prisons, jails, and immigration detention centers. She most recently worked at the ACLU SoCal’s Criminal Justice and Police Practices team, doing litigation and advocacy on criminal justice issues in Southern California, including challenging police misconduct, misdemeanor plea mill systems, and assisting with local advocacy campaigns against police surveillance and sheriff oversight. Before her time at the ACLU SoCal, she worked at Rights Behind Bars, first as a Skadden Fellow and then as the Director of West Coast Litigation, where she led trial and appellate work in prisoner civil rights cases challenging conditions of confinement and abuse by prison officials. Amaris is also a Lecturer in Law and teaches the Prisoners’ Rights Clinic at UCLA School of Law with Professor Aaron Littman. Amaris received her B.A. in Anthropology and Rhetoric from UC Berkeley and her J.D. from UCLA School of Law, where she held specializations in the David J. Epstein Program in Public Interest Law and Policy and Critical Race Studies.