Elizabeth R. OuYang has been a civil rights attorney for 38 years.  Her areas of speciality include voting rights, combating hate crimes and more. For the 2020 redistricting cycle, OuYang served as coordinator of APA VOICE Redistricting Task Force with MinKwon Center for Community Action as the convenor.  This is the largest coalition of APA organizations involved in redistricting in New York State. Headed by the New York Immigration Coalition, OuYang was the founding coordinator of New York Counts 2020, the first statewide coalition of organizations involved in the 2020 Census. OuYang was also a 2020 census trainer with APIA VOTE.

Appointed by President Clinton, OuYang served as a special assistant to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights,  the only federal entity that investigated the voting rights debacle in Florida in the 2000 presidential election that led to the Supreme Court deciding the election. As a staff attorney with the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, OuYang was co-counsel for defendant- intervenors in Diaz, et al. v. Silver, et al., 95 Civ. 2591 (E.D.N.Y. 1995), a voting rights challenge to the 12th Congressional District, a majority Latino district which contained an Asian American influence district.  The Court found that the Asian American community in Brooklyn and Manhattan constituted a community of interest and should be kept together.  The Asian American community remained intact with a large Latino population.

As the founder and supervisor of OCA-NY's Hate Crimes Prevention Art Project for teenagers (now in its 18th successful year), OuYang expanded the Project to include a juvenile diversion component in addition to a youth empowerment project following the spike in hate crimes against Asian Americans during Covid-19.  As President of OCA-NY in 2011, OuYang led the advocacy campaign for justice for Private Danny Chen, a 19 year old soldier found dead in Afghanistan after weeks of unrelenting hazing and maltreatment by his superiors. 

For more than two decades, OuYang has taught at Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race and New York University.  Her publications include  “Two Recent Supreme Court Decisions and Changing Demographics Underscore the Importance of US Citizenship“, University of California Berkeley School of Law’s  Asian American Law Journal, Volume 27, 27 Asian Am. L. J. 4 (2020) 

OuYang is a 1986 graduate of Northeastern University School of Law and licensed in New York and Massachusetts.