Rebecca Salley practices law with the goal of demanding more of our Constitution, our institutions, and our public servants to ensure that bad actors are held accountable for abuses of public trust, truth prevails, and real justice is done for our clients.

As a child in South Louisiana, Salley was introduced to America’s deeply ingrained patterns of segregation, prejudice, and injustice. A seed was planted, ultimately leading her to spend her law school summers immersed in civil rights advocacy. As an intern in the Civil Division at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, Salley realized she found her calling as a civil rights litigator while advocating for deaf New Yorkers, wrongfully detained by police who disregarded rules for communicating with people who were hard of hearing.

That experience was followed by a summer clerkship at the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, Special Litigation Section. At DOJ, Salley worked on a wide variety of issues such as healthcare access for incarcerated persons; protecting women’s access to abortion through enforcement of the FACE Act; and monitoring prisons and assisted living facilities across the country to ensure they met constitutional standards.  

During her time at the University of Michigan Law School, galvanized in the wake of the 2014 Ferguson uprisings and the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement, Salley organized to bring racial justice issues into focus in the law classroom and on campus. As Managing Editor of the Michigan Journal of Race & Law and an Executive Board member of the Women Law Students Association, she facilitated events including a lauded nationwide symposium on the criminalization of poverty, Critical Race Theory reading groups for students and faculty, and other spaces for critically examining the ways in which “the law”— and lawyering itself — affect marginalized people. 

She also represented sex and labor trafficking survivors as a student attorney in Michigan Law’s Human Trafficking Clinic and co-founded the Feminist Collective, a group for law students to discuss sex and gender justice issues. 

These formative experiences help Salley approach her practice not only with an eye toward systemic reform of institutions that fail to serve people, but with an empathetic, client-centered and collaborative approach to lawyering. 

After clerking in the chambers of the Honorable Sara L. Darrow of the U.S. District Court in Rock Island, IL (CD-IL), she worked as a Staff Attorney at the Legal Aid Society of Greater Cincinnati, where she represented low-income families in the housing and public benefits practice groups. 

Salley’s housing work included defending tenants against eviction, advocating for tenants experiencing unsafe housing conditions, and fighting for the preservation of affordable housing for her clients, including tenants displaced by development in Cincinnati’s West End. She worked with families, individuals with disabilities, and the elderly to find legal solutions to problems with health coverage, food and rent assistance, and other vital benefits. As a medical-legal partnership attorney, she provided legal advice and representation to women experiencing high-risk pregnancies with the goals of addressing social determinants of health and optimizing birth outcomes for clients. In addressing the civil legal problems of her Legal Aid clients, she saw first-hand how destabilizing incarceration and predatory policing is to families. 

Before law school, Salley worked as a paralegal in the U.S. Department of Justice, Antitrust Division, where she served on trial teams of high-profile consumer protection lawsuits against corporate giants Apple and American Express, and as a field organizer in Louisville, Kentucky. 

EDUCATION

Columbia University (B.A. cum laude, 2010)

University of Michigan Law School ( J.D. cum laude, 2016)

PRACTICE AREAS

Civil Rights

BAR & Court ADMISSIONS

District of Columbia, 2017

Supreme Court of Ohio, 2018

U.S. District Court, Southern District of Ohio, 2020

U.S. District Court, Northern District of Ohio, 2021

Awards & Honors

Class Day Speaker, Michigan Law Class of 2016

National Association of Women Lawyers Award, 2016

New Leaders Council of Southwest Ohio, Class of 2020