Emily Bazelon is a senior editor at Slate and a Soros Justice Media Fellow. She edits the weekly feature "Assessment" and the magazine's health and science sections. Before joining Slate, Bazelon was a senior editor and writer at Legal Affairs magazine and worked as a law clerk in Portland, Maine. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe. She is a graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School.

Tanya Coke is a program development consultant for major foundations and social justice nonprofits in the United States. She is currently working with the ACLU to help develop strategies to address the impact of the drug war on communities of color.

From 1998 to 2002, she was a director of the Criminal Justice Initiative and later Counsel to OSI's U.S. Programs, where she designed the foundation’s signature initiative to reduce incarceration in the United States. Tanya also founded OSI’s Gideon Project, a grantmaking program focusing on death penalty abolition and improving indigent defense.

Tanya is a graduate of Yale College. She began her career as an anti-death penalty advocate with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and later served as Acting Director of the Poverty and Race Research Action Council (PRRAC). Tanya graduated with honors from New York University School of Law in 1994, where she was a Root-Tilden public interest scholar and Editor-in-Chief of the Law Review. After law school, she clerked for the Honorable Pierre N. Leval on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. Tanya thereafter practiced as a trial attorney in the Federal Defender Division of the Legal Aid Society in Manhattan, where she defended clients in drug, immigration and other federal cases. She is a recipient of the Reebok Human Rights Award (1988) and the Distinguished Recent Graduate Award from NYU School of Law (2004).

Vanita Gupta joined the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) as a Soros Justice Fellow in September 2001. She is now an Assistant Counsel at LDF, where her focus is civil rights litigation that promotes systemic reform of the criminal justice system. Vanita successfully led the effort to overturn the convictions of 38 defendants in Tulia, Texas, organizing over a dozen national law firms in this fight and coordinating the legal and media strategy. Working with co-counsel, she also recently settled the civil rights cases filed on behalf of the wrongfully convicted Tulia residents for $6 million. The settlement also disbanded the narcotics task force responsible for the drug sting and resulted in the early retirement of two key officers involved in overseeing the sting operation.

In furtherance of her clients’ cases, she has appeared on the NBC Today Show, CBS Evening News, CNN, the News Hour, Court TV, MSNBC, and National Public Radio. Gupta has been recognized with the Reebok Human Rights Award in 2004, the Upakar Foundation Community Ambassador award, and the American Red Cross “Rising Star” award. She is a graduate of Yale College and New York University School of Law.

John Kowal is Director of Constitutional and Legal Policy at the Open Society Institute. Kowal started at OSI in 1997 as a Program Fellow and served as Associate Director of the Program of Law & Society from 2000–2003. His current portfolio includes grantmaking to support access to an independent judiciary and the articulation of a progressive vision of the law and the Constitution. He also coordinates the work of OSI’s U.S. Programs pertaining to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues. Kowal serves on the steering committees of three funder affinity groups: the International Human Rights Funders Group (IHRFG), IHRFG’s Human Rights in the US Working Group, and a newly formed Marriage Funders Group.

Before joining OSI, Kowal worked as a litigation attorney at the firms of Cravath, Swaine & Moore and Schulte Roth & Zabel, where he handled a wide range of civil and regulatory cases, including securities, antitrust, mergers and acquisition, and real estate matters. In 1982, he received a B.A. degree in political science, magna cum laude, from New York University, where he was a Presidential Scholar. In 1985, he received a J.D. degree, cum laude, from Harvard Law School.