Rudy Mehrbani and Martha Kinsella

Rudy Mehrbani is a fellow and senior counsel at the Brennan Center. He leads the Center’s work on the bipartisan National Task Force on Rule of Law and Democracy. He previously served as an assistant to President Obama and director of the Presidential Personnel Office at the White House, where he advised the president, cabinet members, and other senior government officials on human capital issues arising across the executive branch of the federal government. In that role, he served as a member of the White House Transition Coordinating Council in 2016. He has also served as general counsel of the Peace Corps and as an associate counsel and special assistant to the president in the White House Counsel’s Office, where he led the team responsible for vetting President Obama’s executive nominees and appointees. He worked in a variety of other roles in the federal government, including as a special policy advisor to the secretary of housing and urban development. Earlier in his career, Mehrbani practiced law as an associate at Kirkland & Ellis LLP in Chicago. He received a BA from Emory University and a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. He completed an international comparative business law program at Bucerius Law School in Hamburg, Germany. He is currently a presidentially appointed member of the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board. Martha Kinsella, counsel in the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program, is based in the Washington, DC, office. She works on rights restoration, democracy reform, and government reform. Her principal project has been the National Task Force on Rule of Law and Democracy, with a focus on scientific integrity. Prior to joining the Brennan Center, Kinsella worked at the National Labor Relations Board, where she served first as a policy advisor and then as a trial attorney conducting enforcement litigation. During her tenure at the NLRB, she served as grievance chair of her union and received two agency awards for her pro bono work. She began her legal career as a law clerk to Judge Philip Carchman of the Appellate Division of New Jersey Superior Court. Kinsella received her law degree from New York University School of Law, a master’s degree from Northwestern University, and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago.