Commission Members
| Commission Member | Appointing Officer | Term Start Date | Term End Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Beverly Hayon | Mayor | January 6, 2011 | February 1, 2012 |
| Benedict Y. Hur, Esq. | Assessor | March 2, 2010 | February 1, 2016 |
| Dorothy S. Liu, Esq. | Board of Supervisors | April 6, 2011 | February 1, 2017 |
| Paul A. Renne, Esq. | District Attorney | February 8, 2012 | February 1, 2013 |
| Jamienne S. Studley, Esq. | City Attorney | January 23, 2007 | February 1, 2014 |
Commissioners' Biographies
BENEDICT Y. HUR, Chairperson
(Appointed by the Assessor)
Benedict Y. Hur was appointed to the Commission on March 2, 2010 by Assessor Phil Ting. Ben is a partner at Keker & Van Nest LLP in San Francisco. He has focused his practice on complex commercial litigation and white collar criminal and securities defense. Ben also has experience in legal malpractice defense and intellectual property litigation.
Ben received a B.A. and M.A. degree from Stanford University and was elected to membership in Phi Beta Kappa. After serving as a Coro Fellow in Public Affairs in San Francisco, Ben attended Harvard Law School. He worked for another prominent law firm before serving as a law clerk to the Hon. Saundra Brown Armstrong of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California.
Ben lives in San Francisco with his wife Linnea and their two children. He serves on the California State Bar's Committee on the Administration of Justice.
JAMIENNE S. STUDLEY, Vice-Chairperson
(Appointed by the City Attorney)
Jamienne S. Studley joined Public Advocates as President and CEO in 2004. Public Advocates, a California social justice law firm, challenges the systemic causes of poverty and discrimination by defending and expanding civil rights through policy advocacy, litigation, and partnership with community groups. It is currently focusing on education, transit, and housing equity, critical building block issues for communities.
Prior to this position, Commissioner Studley was President of Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, N.Y., and most recently Scholar-in-Residence at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. She served as Deputy and Acting General Counsel to the U.S. Department of Education in the Clinton Administration, advising Secretary Riley on legal matters, including civil rights, legislation, and student aid. She led the department's regulatory reinvention initiative and was a member of the White House Regulatory Reform Working Group. As Acting General Counsel she oversaw the department's Ethics Division, which trained all employees and advised current and former employees on ethics issues and ensured the Department's knowledge of and compliance with all ethics laws and policies.
She was also Associate Dean and Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School, where she helped establish the loan forgiveness program for graduates in public service, and Executive Director of the National Association for Law Placement, spearheading its race, gender, and sexual orientation equity programs. Commissioner Studley is a graduate of Barnard College (1972 magna cum laude) and Harvard Law School and was a member of the American Bar Association Commissions on Women in the Profession and on Loan Forgiveness and Repayment. She now serves on the boards of the Association of American Colleges & Universities, The Urban School, American Craft Council, San Francisco Museum of Craft & Design, and First Book Advisory Council. She was a member of the Harvard Law School Visiting Committee and Chair of the Equal Justice Works consumer information project advisory committee.
BEVERLY HAYON, Comissioner
(Appointed by the Mayor)
Beverly Hayon is a retired media and communications professional.
She was Director of National Media Relations for Kaiser Permanente, Director of Public Information for San Francisco Department of Public Health, and was a producer, writer, and on-air program host at KGO-TV and KRON-TV.
Active in local community affairs, Hayon has served on the Library Commission, and is a past Chair of the San Francisco Commission on the Status of Women. She has served on the boards of the CORO Foundation, the San Francisco Friends of the Library, Bay Area Big Sisters, and Mayor Dianne Feinstein's Gun Control Task Force. She currently serves on the Metta Fund board.
Hayon is a graduate of San Francisco State University, has been a CORO Fellow and MALDEF Leadership Fellow, in addition to completing the Stanford University Executive Business Program.
DOROTHY S. LIU, Commissioner
(Appointed by the Board of Supervisors)
Dorothy was appointed to serve on the Commission in April 2011 by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Dorothy is a partner at Hanson Bridgett, LLP in San Francisco where she has practiced labor and employment law since 1999. She advises and counsels both public and private organizations on employment compliance and human resources matters, and she regularly represents her clients in state and federal courts at the trial and appellate levels.
Dorothy received her B.A. from Stanford University and her J.D. from the University of Washington School of Law. Following law school, Dorothy served as a judicial clerk for The Honorable Walter E. Webster, Jr., of the Washington State Court of Appeals, where she clerked from 1997 to 1999 before moving back to San Francisco.
Public service has been an important part of Dorothy's career. As an undergraduate, she interned for the San Francisco District Attorney's Consumer Fraud unit, while also volunteering in San Francisco's Chinatown, teaching photography to at-risk youth. During law school, she interned for the Northwest Immigrant Rights' Project, handling immigration cases for juveniles. During that same time, Dorothy also was a member of the Ninth Circuit's Pro Se Advocacy Pro Bono project. She and her teammates briefed and argued an appeal before the Ninth Circuit on behalf of a pro se litigant, successfully obtaining a new trial based on an erroneous jury instruction. While in private practice, Dorothy has continued to volunteer in the San Francisco community. From 2003 to 2007, Dorothy served as co-chair of the Community Services Committee for the Asian American Bar Association (AABA), partnering with local organizations to assist with community rebuilding projects in San Francisco and to assist with running monthly legal clinics for low income San Francisco residents.
PAUL A. RENNE, Commissioner
(Appointed by the District Attorney)
Paul A. Renne is senior counsel to the Cooley Litigation department. Resident in the San Francisco office, he has been with the Firm since 1964.
Mr. Renne's practice is primarily related to litigating complex business disputes, with special emphasis on securities litigation, accountants' malpractice, trade secrets and intellectual property matters. He has tried in excess of 100 jury trials, including two lengthy jury trials, one of four months and the other of five months, in which he successfully defended clients against allegations of securities fraud.
His legal career began as a law clerk to Judge Edwin D. Steel Jr., U.S. District Court of Delaware, from 1959 to 1960. He was an associate at Haight, Gardner, Poor & Havens in New York from 1960 to 1961. In 1961, he joined the Kennedy Administration as an attorney in the Civil Rights Division, Department of Justice, and in 1962, he was appointed an assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, and remained in that position until joining the Firm.
Mr. Renne received a law degree from Harvard University in 1959. He attended the University of Minnesota from 1948 to 1951 and received an A.B. from that school in 1956 after serving five years as a jet pilot in the U.S. Air Force.
Mr. Renne is a fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers, serving as State Chair for Northern California. He is a member of the American, California and San Francisco bar associations and a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation and presently is a member of the Executive Committee of the Litigation Section, California State Bar. He is listed in The Best Lawyers of America. He is the author of a number of articles, including one in Volume 29, Vanderbilt Law Review, "Eliminating Redlining by Judicial Action: Are Erasers Available," and a chapter on "Final Argument" in the Practising Law Institute publication, Civil Trial Practice. For a number of years, he was adjunct professor of law at Golden Gate University, where he taught a trial practice course and has lectured on trial practice to numerous legal groups, including California's Continuing Education of the Bar.
Mr. Renne is a member of the American Arbitration Association Committee Panel, completing both the Arbitration I and II courses given by AAA. He has served as a mediator in numerous cases for both the Bar Association of San Francisco and the U.S. District Court and as a Judge Pro Tem in the San Francisco Superior Court.
Mr. Renne is admitted to practice in the District of Columbia (1959), New York (1961) and California (1964), as well as the Supreme Court of the United States.
