Shalini Goel Agarwal co-leads Protect Democracy’s Free Expression and the Right to Dissent team, working to protect speech and press freedom. She has litigated civil rights cases for over 15 years, challenging all manner of unconstitutional policies from universal drug testing of welfare applicants to lack of access to counsel in immigrant detention to speech codes prohibiting DEI trainings in the workplace. Previously, she was a senior supervising attorney at the Southern Poverty Law Center focusing on criminal justice reform and a staff attorney at the ACLU of Florida. Shalini clerked for Judge David S. Tatel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and received her J.D. from U.C. Berkeley Law.