Lia Sifuentes Davis

Lia Sifuentes Davis directs the Civil Rights Clinic at the University of Texas School of Law. Students in the Civil Rights Clinic represent clients in a variety of civil rights matters including police misconduct, jail mistreatment, disability discrimination, employment discrimination, voting rights claims, and housing justice. The Civil Rights Clinic also engages with various advocacy projects around emerging civil rights issues. She has directed the Civil Rights Clinic since 2022.

Prior to clinical teaching, Lia was a senior litigation attorney at Disability Rights Texas, where she litigated and advocated on a variety of civil rights issues pertaining to the rights of people with disabilities. She has represented hundreds of individual clients and also organizations like the National Federation of the Blind of Texas and Coalitions of Texans with Disabilities. She led the voting rights team at Disability Right Texas in its litigation and amicus practice to address voting issues and laws impacting people with disabilities. In addition to voting rights work, she litigated employment disability discrimination cases and diverse issues under Title II and Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act. She’s been invited to present nationally and statewide on a variety of disability-related topics.

Lia is active in national, state, and local organizations. She is a board member of the Disability Rights Bar Association and Texas Harm Reduction Alliance, and is a member of the National Employment Lawyers Association and the Texas Employment Lawyers Association.

In 2018, she was awarded the Kristi Couvillon Pro Bono Award from Texas Civil Rights Project and in 2022, she was awarded the Texas Law Fellowships Excellence in Public Interest Award. She is a graduate of the University of Texas School of Law and Brown University, where she concentrated in Community Health and American Studies.