2017-2018 BLSA Honorees

Lifetime Achievement Award

Dr. Cheryl Jester George

Cheryl Jester-George has more than 30 years of college administration experience in student affairs. As the senior director of admissions, she is responsible for policy setting, implementation and evaluation of Georgia State Law’s admissions, scholarships and retention processes.

Jester-George works with the Law School Admission Council and serves on the Diversity Committee. She serves on many panels regarding law school admissions, retention and pipeline initiatives. She also has been an active member of the Law Related Education Consortium Board of Directors for more than 11 years, a program promoting the teaching of civil and law related courses in secondary schools.

During her tenure, Jester-George has made an effort to focus on and implement secondary education and pipeline programs. She has developed mentoring programs with Morehouse College and with high schools in Georgia’s DeKalb and Rockdale county school systems.

Jester-George has planned and presented at the Minority Leadership Conference in Georgia and has served as a co-organizer of the Gate City Bar Association’s Justice Robert Benham Law Camp, which is held at the College of Law every summer. Jester-George serves on the workgroup for the State Department of Education legal services pathway.

Jester-George is an adjunct professor in the College of Business at Clark Atlanta University. She holds an Ed.D. from Clark Atlanta University.

She is a member of the Georgia State University’s Staff Council and serves as chair of the Administrative Committee. Jester-George also chairs the University’s Advancement of Women Staff Steering committee. She is the winner of several awards for service, including the Georgia State University Sparks award for her contribution to the university community.

Jester-George received the Distinguished Service award from the University System of Georgia’s Administrative Committee on Graduate Work and the Linda Chastain Faculty/Staff Member of the Year Award from the Black Law Student Association.

Bernadette Hartfield Faculty Award Recipient

Professor Natsu Taylor Saito

Natsu Taylor Saito was a teacher and a community organizer/activist in Atlanta in the 1970s. Her involvement with challenges to wrongful convictions as well as efforts to desegregate the university system and to support public housing tenant associations during the Atlanta child murders convinced her to go to law school.

After graduating from Yale Law School in 1987 she worked at several large law firms in Atlanta before joining the faculty at Georgia State University’s College of Law in 1994. Since then, she has taught courses in international law and human rights, indigenous rights, professional responsibility, immigration law, and the legal history of race in the United States.

Now a Distinguished University Professor, Professor Saito is the author of more than thirty law review articles and two books, Meeting Enemy: American Exceptionalism and International Law (2010) and From Chinese Exclusion to Guantánamo Bay: Plenary Power and the Prerogative State (2006). She is now writing a book on race and racism as a function of settler colonialism in the United States.

Professor Saito received the Critical Race Studies in Education Association (CRSEA)’s Derrick Bell Legacy Award in 2014, and in 2015 served as an expert consultant to the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism. From 2000-2016 she co-directed the Human Rights Research Fund with Kathleen Cleaver. Professor Saito was the founding president of the Georgia chapter of the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association (NAPABA), and served on the Board of Governors of the Society of American Law Teachers (SALT) for over a decade, often chairing its Academic Freedom committee. She currently serves on the City of Atlanta’s Criminal Justice Reform Commission.

York Singleton Staff Appreciation Award Recipient

Professor Tiffany Williams-Roberts

Tiffany Roberts is a civil rights and criminal defense attorney in Atlanta. She has practiced criminal defense since 2008, first as a public defender with the Atlanta Judicial Circuit Public Defender and later as a solo practitioner beginning in 2011. As a public defender, Tiffany represented hundreds of indigent clients facing felony prosecution and graduated from the Gideon’s Promise trial advocacy training program. She expanded her private practice to include civil rights litigation for victims of police abuse.

A significant portion of Tiffany’s practice is dedicated to pro bono representation of activists and organizers. She has been recognized by the Atlanta NAACP, DeKalb Lawyers Association and Southern Center for Human rights for movement lawyering and social justice activism. Most recently, SCHR awarded Tiffany and other members of the pro bono legal team representing Basil Eleby (the man accused of setting a 2017 on Interstate I-85) with their Gideon’s Promise Award.

Tiffany has volunteered with organizations promoting justice, fairness and equity in the criminal justice system for her entire legal career. A community organizer, she co-founded police accountability organization Building Locally to Organize for Community Safety (BLOCS) in 2008 to promote a holistic approach to public safety. BLOCS successfully advocated for legislative improvements to the Atlanta Citizen Review Board along with other critical local policy changes. In 2015, Tiffany co‐founded Lawyers United for a New Atlanta (LUNA) in response to calls for criminal justice reforms in Atlanta courtrooms. She is also a founding member of the Atlanta chapter of the global Black Lives Matter network, which first convened in 2015. Tiffany was featured as a critic’s choice for one of four Best Citizen Activists by Creative Loafing Atlanta that same year.

In addition to working with grassroots organizations, Tiffany is extensively involved in government reform efforts. In 2010, she was appointed to sit on the search committee for the selection of the Atlanta’s police chief. Her appointment was based on her leadership role in BLOCS. Her civic engagement continued in 2013 as she served on an Atlanta City Council working group to evaluate legislation to address the equitable treatment of sex workers in the city limits. Tiffany joined the Atlanta Fulton County PreArrest Diversion Program (PAD) Design Team in 2017 and continues her work with PAD as a member of its Advisory Board. PAD enables law enforcement to refer community members to social services in lieu of arrest. Tiffany is a member of Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms’ Progressive Agenda Working Group (PAWG), which is responsible for populating and convening commissions focusing on four key social justice issues: criminal justice reform, housing affordability, homelessness and workforce development. Tiffany is co-chair of the PAWG Criminal Justice Reform Commission and sits on Mayor Bottoms’ Transition Team Criminal Justice Reform Subcommittee. Her work with PAWG in coalition with several attorneys and community organizations was critical to securing bail reform within Mayor Bottoms’ first month in office. As chairperson of the Ebenezer Baptist Church Social Justice Ministry, Tiffany works to build bridges between grassroots social justice organizations, the legal community and faith-based institutions.

Tiffany is Deputy Director of the National Institute for Teaching Ethics and Professionalism (NIFTEP) and Adjunct Professor of Law at the Georgia State University College of Law. Since 2011, Tiffany has co-taught Fundamentals of Law Practice, an experiential course that aims to prepare law students for small firm practice through live-client representation, fieldwork and doctrinal instruction. Through her position with NIFTEP, Tiffany plans international workshops, conferences and symposia dedicated to helping practitioners and academics find innovative ways to teach ethics and professionalism to law students

BLSA Distinguished Alumni Award Recipient

Attorney Kevin Coleman

Kevin is an associate in the Corporate practice at Troutman Sanders, LLP. His practice focuses on assisting publicly-held and privately-held companies with all aspects of corporate and securities transactions including mergers and acquisitions, public offerings and private placements of debt and equity securities, corporate governance and compliance matters, and general corporate matters.

In 2015, Kevin received his JD/MBA with honors from Georgia State University where he worked as an Associate Research Editor for the Georgia State Law Review and served as President of the Black Law Students Association. He also competed as a student attorney on the College of Law’s mock trial team and finished as a national champion, regional champion, and finalist in the 2014 William T. Daniel National Invitational Mock Trial, the 2014 National Trial Competition, and the 2015 South Texas Mock Trial Challenge, respectively.

Ronald J. Freeman Student of the Year Award Recipient

Shakil Robinson

Shakil Robinson is a rising 3L at Georgia State University College of Law. Shakil entered law school with an interest in real estate law, but acquired an interest in tax law and data privacy law through the College of Law's elective courses. When Shakil isn't in class he spends his time in the law school working as a representative for LexisNexis and Themis Bar Prep.