Office of General Counsel

As Brown's General Counsel, Sandhya serves as Brown's chief legal officer.  She advises the University's senior leadership team, the Corporation, and divisions and departments across campus on a broad array of legal and strategic issues; leads the team of attorneys and staff members in the Office of the General Counsel to develop and execute Brown's legal strategy; and serves as a member of the President's Cabinet.

Sandhya's legal practice spans higher education, civil rights law enforcement, nonprofit advocacy, and private practice.  Before coming to Brown in 2024, Sandhya served as General Counsel and Secretary at Dartmouth College and at Oberlin College.  Earlier, she was chief attorney for the U.S. Department of Education Cleveland Office for Civil Rights and worked in the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division's Special Litigation Section, where she ultimately served as special counsel.  She received a total of seven awards at those two agencies for her work managing teams that investigated and remedied civil rights violations by a wide range of entities, including educational institutions.  She also served as policy counsel for the National Partnership for Women & Families (formerly the Women's Legal Defense Fund), where she advocated for state and federal policies to improve family and medical leave and co-authored an amicus curiae brief for a U.S. Supreme Court case recognizing a Title IX cause of action for peer sexual harassment.  Previously, she served as an associate in the litigation and labor and employment groups at Ropes & Gray.  

Sandhya has a B.S. summa cum laude in chemistry and women's studies from Yale College and a J.D. from Yale Law School, and she was a judicial law clerk for Judge Sidney Thomas of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.  She has served on the boards of the National Association of College and University Attorneys and the Yale Law Journal.