Director, Youth Justice Education Clinic
Visiting Associate Clinical Professor
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Education
- BA, Stanford University
- JD, UCLA School of Law
Background
Vivian Wong specializes in education law and policy and is the Director of the Youth Justice Education Clinic (YJEC) at the Center for Juvenile Law and Policy. YJEC provides holistic education advocacy to young people who have been criminalized or pushed out of school due to their various vulnerable identities. Under her guidance, law students represent clients in special education, school discipline, and regional center matters, and advocate in juvenile court. In 2021, Wong co-created the Education Policy Practicum, an opportunity for law students to engage in live youth justice policy initiatives through YJEC in collaboration with community partners.
Prior to joining LLS, Wong was a Skadden Fellow at the Learning Rights Law Center, where she developed a program to provide intensive, trauma-informed special education legal services for system-involved youth, with an emphasis on increasing mental health access. Wong’s passion for education equity, as well as disability and racial justice, stems from her experiences as a woman of color with a disability working with marginalized young people. Her passion for disability activism began in college, where she founded an organization to create safe spaces for students with hidden and visible disabilities.
Before pursuing her law degree, Wong received a Stanford Public Interest Network Fellowship to help first-generation, low-income students to apply and prepare for college. She worked closely with students who grappled with abusive families, unstable homes, gang violence, and anxiety over poverty and legal status. During law school, she sought every opportunity to serve students with disabilities through direct legal services and impact litigation addressing school force-out issues that disproportionately affect students of color with disabilities.
Through a career in holistic advocacy, Wong works towards dismantling the school-prison nexus and ensuring that all youth of color with disabilities receive a quality education. She received a B.A. from Stanford University and a J.D. from UCLA School of Law, where she specialized in the Critical Race Studies and David J. Epstein Public Interest Program in Law and Policy programs.