Plea Bargaining Institute Welcomes New Members to Board

“We are very glad and honored to welcome Lisa and Clark to the board,” said Lucian Dervan, Founding Director of the Institute. “They both have deep knowledge of the criminal justice system and the role of pleas of guilty and plea bargaining. We will certainly benefit greatly from their insights.”

You can review the complete list of Board of Advisors here. Biographies on the new members are provided below.

Clark Neily

Senior Vice President for Legal Studies at the Cato Institute

Clark Neily is Senior Vice President for Legal Studies at the Cato Institute. His areas of interest include constitutional law, individual rights, overcriminalization, coercive plea bargaining, and police accountability. Before joining Cato in 2017, Neily was a senior attorney and constitutional litigator at the Institute for Justice and Director of the Institute’s Center for Judicial Engagement. He has been an adjunct professor at the University of Texas and George Mason’s Antonin Scalia School of Law, and he served as co-counsel in District of Columbia v. Heller, in which the Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own a gun. He received a Bachelor of Arts in Plan II (with concentrations in philosophy and Russian) from the University of Texas at Austin, and he also received his law degree from the University of Texas, where he was Chief Articles Editor of the Texas Law Review. Neily is the author of Terms of Engagement: How Our Courts Should Enforce the Constitution’s Promise of Limited Government.

Lisa Bailey Vavonese

Chief of Staff at Community Justice Solutions

Lisa Bailey Vavonese is Chief of Staff at Community Justice Solutions (CJS), a venture of the Center for Justice Innovation. In this role, Lisa oversees the department-wide implementation of the strategic vision for CJS, leading key initiatives to secure its sustainability and extend its national reach. She also oversees core operational processes within CJS and develops partnerships with funders and partners, including policymakers and the media. Previously at the Center, Lisa was the director of Research-Practice Strategies, pairing researchers with practitioners to conduct original research and provide expert assistance to jurisdictions across the country. Her areas of expertise include public defense and the protection of constitutional rights.

Prior to joining the Center, Lisa served as Director of the Reentry Clinic at the Center for Community Alternatives in Syracuse and as an Assistant Public Defender in Monroe County, New York. Her work also includes assisting refugees in Tanzania with resettlement applications, advocating for survivors of domestic violence in Malaysia, and conducting legal research for judges at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague. Lisa received her B.A. from Hartwick College and her J.D. from the State University of New York at Buffalo Law School.