An interdisciplinary author, lawyer, teacher, and community organizer, Mallika Kaur’s work and scholarship focuses on human rights with a specialization in gender and minority issues. She has worked with victim-survivors of gendered violence for two decades, including as an emergency room crisis counselor, expert witness on domestic violence and sexual violence, researcher, and attorney. 

Mallika is the co-founder and Executive Director (as of 2021) of Sikh Family Center, the only Sikh American organization focused on gender-based violence. Working with local civil society, academic institutions, advocacy organizations, and government agencies, she combines research, advocacy, scholarship, and the law as an approach towards sustainable change.

Mallika  directs the Domestic Violence & Gender-Based Violence Practicum at Berkeley Law. She teaches courses, including “Negotiating Trauma, Emotions & the Practice of Law”  that engage students in questions about violence, trauma, redress, and the law’s possible efficacy towards individual and systemic transformation. 

Mallika believes what happens inside a home is intimately connected to what happens inside communities as a whole: since struggles are interconnected, commitment to justice must never be selective. In South Asia, she has worked on a range of issues including farmer suicides, female feticide, and transformative justice. In the United States, Mallika has worked on issues including post-9/11 violence, civil remedies for intimate violence, policing practices, political asylum, and racial discrimination. 

Mallika is the author of the books “Faith, Gender, and Activism in the Punjab Conflict: The Wheat Fields Still Whisper” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) and “How to Account for Trauma and Emotions in Legal Teaching (opens in a new tab)” (June 2024). She writes regularly for online and print media as well as academic publications; her work has been published in Foreign Policy, Washington Post, Ms. Magazine, and California Law Review, among others. Mallika trains lawyers as well as non-lawyers on cultural humility, elimination of bias, and negotiating trauma, towards more ethical, robust and fulfilling practice.