Biography

Mariela Olivares is a Professor of Law at Howard University School of Law. She teaches Torts, Immigration Law, Family Law, and a seminar on Domestic Violence Law. She also directs Howard’s Family Law Certificate Program. She served as the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs from 2019 to 2025. Professor Olivares has taught at the Catholic University of America Columbus School of Law and was a clinical teaching fellow at Georgetown Law School. 

Her professional and scholarly interests include the intersection of immigration law and policy and critical legal studies and immigration aspects of family law and domestic violence law, with a focus on family and child separation and detention. An expert in these fields, her work has been published in the Harvard Law Review Forum, the Georgia State Law Review, American University Law Review, the Harvard Latino Law Review, the Missouri Law Review, and the Nebraska Law Review, among others. 

She served as the Chair of AALS Minority Groups Section and has served on planning committees for other national organizations’ events. She was elected to the American Law Institute in 2024 and was selected as an American Bar Foundation Fellow in 2019. Appointed by Governor Wes Moore in 2023, she is a Commissioner on the Maryland Public Ethics Commission. Prior to law teaching, Professor Olivares litigated on behalf of domestic violence survivors in D.C. family court. The student body of Howard Law selected Professor Olivares as faculty member of the year in 2020.

Professor Olivares clerked on the Supreme Court of Texas. She received her LLM in Advocacy with Distinction from Georgetown University Law Center and graduated from the University of Michigan Law School where she was a Clarence Darrow Scholar and an Executive Editor of the Michigan Law Review. Professor Olivares graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Texas-Austin with highest honors and special honors with degrees in Plan II Honors and Spanish Literature.

Professor Olivares is a member of the D.C. Bar and Texas Bar.