Angelo Ancheta is an attorney and consultant with over 30 years of professional experience in law, public policy, nonprofit management, and higher education. He was a law professor and clinic director at the Santa Clara University School of Law from 2005 to 2014, and has been a lecturer at the Harvard Law School, an adjunct professor at the New York University School of Law, and a lecturer at the UCLA School of Law. From 2000 to 2004, he was the Director of Legal and Advocacy Programs for The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University. Focusing on immigration and civil rights law, he began his legal career in the late 1980s as a staff attorney at the Asian Law Alliance in San Jose and was the executive director of the Asian Law Caucus in San Francisco from 1994 to 1998.
Angelo’s current legal practice focuses on civil rights law and appellate advocacy, and he has participated in recent litigation defending affirmative action in higher education and race-conscious assignment policies in K-12 education. He has authored a number of appellate briefs on social science evidence and constitutional law that have been cited in the U.S. Supreme Court.
He has also been involved in California state government, and between 2011 and 2020 was a member and chair of the California Citizens Redistricting Commission, the state’s first independent commission charged with drawing the congressional and state legislative boundaries for elected representatives.
Angelo has written numerous law review and professional journal articles on civil rights law, focusing on voting rights, affirmative action in higher education, K-12 school desegregation, and the use of scientific evidence in constitutional litigation. He has also written two books on civil rights and constitutional law: Race, Rights, and the Asian American Experience (Rutgers University Press, 1998; 2d ed. 2006) and Scientific Evidence and Equal Protection of the Law (Rutgers University Press, 2006).
Angelo has an A.B. and J.D from UCLA, an M.P.A. from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, and an M.A. in Politics from Claremont Graduate University. Trained in American politics, mathematical and computational methods, and geographic information systems, he is currently completing his Ph.D. in political science at Claremont Graduate University.
Angelo lives in San Francisco with his wife and two children.