Rita Sethi is a graduate of Barnard College and Northeastern University School of Law. She has handled individual and systemic Title VIII housing discrimination cases at Brooklyn Legal Services and The Open Housing Center, a fair housing advocacy organization. She practiced employment law as the Director of Investigations at the Office of Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action at Columbia University and, since 2010, as consulting counsel for New York area labor and employment law firms. In this capacity she has advocated for plaintiffs in informal negotiations, mediations, and at administrative agencies and in state and federal court under Title VII, the Americans with Disabilities Act, New York State and New York City anti-discrimination laws, the Fair Labor Standards Act, the New York Labor Law, the Equal Pay Act, the Family Medical Leave Act, and the False Claims Act.

Ms. Sethi has taught at Columbia University School of Law, the Maurice Deane School of Law at Hofstra University, the University of Connecticut School of Law, and the School of Law at CUNY. She completed her mediation training in 2002 and 2019 with Columbia University and Victims Services, participated in the Community Mediation Services Apprenticeship Program and is currently a mediator for Community Mediation Services of Queens and for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York Americans with Disabilities Act Title III Mediation Program.

Her writing has been published in The State of Asian-America: Activism and Resistance in the 1990s, Rutgers Women’s Rights Law Reporter and Roger Williams University Law Review (forthcoming 2022). She has presented on or moderated dozens of panel discussions on fair housing law, employment law, and mediation. She served on the Executive Board of the National Employment Lawyers Association of New York from 2018 – 2020 and, since 2017, has served as its Chair for continuing legal education.