Dr. Aleksandra Chauhan directs the Criminal Practice Clinic where second- and third-year law students represent clients on criminal charges, provide parole representation and assist clients with elimination of barriers to successful reentry.

Before joining the faculty at the law school, Dr. Chauhan was the Juvenile Defender Advocate at the South Carolina Commission on Indigent Defense, a position she was instrumental in creating. There she supported the work of public defenders and other lawyers in representing youth in the state’s courts. Before then, she was an assistant public defender in Richland County representing youth in the family and criminal courts. While there, she received grants and pioneered the agency’s youth reentry program, providing holistic representation of young people with the assistance of civil counsel and a social worker to aid young people in returning to their communities.

Dr. Chauhan is a certified trainer for the Gault Center’s Youth Defender Advocacy Training Immersion Program, and is one of its Ambassadors for Racial Justice, a program in partnership with the Georgetown Law Juvenile Justice Initiative commissioning lawyers to create training and programming to reduce race disparities in the criminal system. In 2019, Dr. Chauhan graduated from SC BAR Leadership Academy and in 2017, she was recognized as a Juvenile Public Defender of the Year. In May 2023, Dr. Chauhan was recognized by the American Bar Association for her work with youth in the state’s courts, when she received its Livingston Hall Award, which recognizes lawyers who have made significant contributions in that field.

Dr. Chauhan has a wide range of expertise on issues related to client representation, including topics of youth transfer to adult court, school-to-prison pipeline, reentry, trauma, and racial justice. She has written amicus briefs and presented keynotes and workshops on these issues at local, national, and international conferences.

Dr. Chauhan is on the Board of Directors for Every Black Girl, Inc. and Lawyers’ Committee on Children’s Right. She serves on the Advisory Counsel for the Gault Center South and the Advisory Board for the State Crisis Intervention Program. She chairs the Legal Innovations Subcommittee for the SC Human Trafficking Task Force and is a member of the SC Bar House of Delegates. She also served on the Board of Directors for Columbia’s Nickelodeon Theater, and helped create East Point Academy, a Mandarin immersion charter school where her twin sons attended.

Education

• J.D. (2013) University of South Carolina School of Law
• Ph.D. (2010) University of South Carolina, Department of Political Science
• M.A. (2001) Chrzescijanska Akademia Teologiczna, Warsaw, Poland
• B.A. (1997) Ewangelikalna Wyzsza Szkola Teologiczna, Wroclaw, Poland