Education Advocacy Program
Maronel Barajas, Senior Staff Attorney
Maronel Barajas is a senior staff attorney who joined the Disability Rights Legal Center in February 2011. Ms. Barajas has worked in several public interest areas including housing, labor union disputes, employment, and education. Prior to joining the Disability Rights Legal Center, Ms. Barajas was an associate at the civil rights law firm of Traber & Voorhees, where she focused on employment discrimination cases, wage and hour class actions, and educational rights cases. Before that Ms. Barajas was the Director of the Disability Rights Legal Center’s Education Advocacy Program where she oversaw all aspects of the Program, including supervising ligation and administrative proceedings that sought to enforce and extend the educational rights of students with disabilities. In addition to her work at the Center, Ms. Barajas taught a special education course at Loyola Marymount University. Ms. Barajas now co-teaches this course.
Ms. Barajas is a 2003 graduate of Columbia Law School, where she was involved with both Columbia’s Tenants Rights Project and the Unemployment Action Committee. She was also a member of the Columbia Human Rights Law Review and the Columbia Journal of Gender and the Law. Ms. Barajas graduated magna cum laude and with departmental honors from the University of California, Irvine, where she received her B.A.s in Criminology Law & Society and Sociology. Ms. Barajas is also a member of Phi Beta Kappa and the Golden Key National Honor Society.