Orly Rachmilovitz
USC Gould School of Law

Orly Rachmilovitz (pronouns: she/her/her) is a lecturer in law at the USC Gould School of Law. Her areas of expertise encompass health law (emphases on mental health and sexual/ reproductive health), family law, law and sexuality. She currently teaches courses in health law and disability law. Additionally, she works as a consultant to American and international clients, providing expert opinions and research on precedential constitutional and human rights cases in areas such as age of consent laws, family law and refugee law. She also works with clients to produce court documents, translations and social media or blog content.

Before working as a legal consultant, Rachmilovitz was the first Israeli scholar to clerk for the Constitutional Court of South Africa, the country’s highest court. While at the Constitutional Court, she worked on matters involving South Africa's recognition of wrongful birth claims, intersectional employment discrimination, incarceration and hospitalization of children with mental disabilities, and South Africa's duty to investigate crimes against humanity. Additionally, Rachmilovitz, along with a small committee of clerks, revised and updated the South African Judiciary's policy on sexual harassment. Notably, she was the inaugural recipient of the Orrick International Law Fellowship, which funded her appointment.

Her appointment to the Court followed a position as a visiting assistant professor at the Boston University School of Law, where she taught courses on health law and sexuality and the law. Her research sits at the intersection of civil and human rights, family law and health law. Her scholarship has appeared in publications such as the Minnesota Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law, and William and Mary Journal of Women and the Law, and has been adopted by Federal legislation and state Supreme Court opinions. Before joining BU she was a visiting fellow at the UCLA Williams Institute, a mental health law fellow at the Institute of Law, Psychiatry and Public Policy at the University of Virginia, and a law fellow at the Learning Rights Law Center in Los Angeles. In Israel, she clerked for Judge Eilata Ziskind of the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court. She is admitted to the Israeli Bar Association (inactive).

Rachmilovitz earned her SJD from the University of Virginia School of Law, her LLM with honors from UCLA School of Law, her LLB from the University of Haifa Faculty of Law in Israel and her BA in psychology from the University of Haifa.

Rachmilovitz is highly committed to promoting social justice through teaching and scholarship that examines how the law implicates socially disadvantaged groups. She is incredibly excited to be part of the USC Gould Law community and spend the next few months engaging with students on an ever-changing area of the law that is at the forefront of many legal, economic and social issues.    

FACULTY IN THE NEWS

Los Angeles Times
May 11, 2022
Re: Emily Ryo

Emily Ryo was interviewed about how immigration shortfalls, like soaring housing prices, are fueling California’s population drop. “A whole assortment of the service sector area has been tremendously affected by a lack of immigrant labor that we haven’t really seen and is just really unprecedented,” she said. “Immigrant labor has been a huge part of the long-term home care sector, and a decline in the population in California has had a significant effect.”

RECENT SCHOLARSHIP

Ariela Gross
March, 2022

“Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana,” Centre International de Recherches sur les Esclavages at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France.

Camille Gear Rich
March, 2022

“No More Boxes to Check: Imagining The Anti-Racist Law Firm,” NALP Annual Education Conference, New Orleans, LA.

Thomas D. Lyon
March, 2022

“Disclosure Among Child Abuse Victims” (with K. London and M. Eisen), Fourth Zoom Psychology and Law Symposium: Children in Legal Settings, Maastrict University, Maastricht, Netherlands.