Shawn Holley
American lawyer
Shawn Katherine Chapman Holley is an American defense attorney.
Early life and education
Holley was raised in Los Angeles. Her mother was a legal secretary who earned an M.B.A. through night classes and became the manager of a prestigious law firm. Though Holley spent many hours at her mother's law firm, she was uninterested in the law until she met "a cool lawyer who did work that excited her". She enrolled in law school and one summer took a law clerk position at the public defenders office which included interviewing people who had been detained.
The experience was a revelation. "The holding cell is packed with people," Holley recalls. "Packed! Everybody is black or brown. I was like, 'I don’t understand—how is it that only black or brown men have committed crimes?'
Holley graduated from University of California at Los Angeles with a B.A. in English in 1984, and from Southwestern Law School with a J.D. in 1988.
“Shawn Holley” enters the record as american lawyer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Shawn, Holley and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q17306021. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1984 and 1988.
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This entry incorporates text from “Shawn Holley” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.