Sonja researches water law and policy with a focus on water rights, community access, water security, conservation, water reuse, watershed restoration, and climate-resilient water systems. Her work examines how communities can diversify water resources while balancing environmental sustainability, affordability, public trust, and long-term resilience.

Sonja's California wildfire policy work focuses on vegetation management, prescribed grazing, and the regulatory and economic conditions affecting California’s goat-grazing industry. She is particularly interested in expanding sustainable, ecologically informed approaches to fuel reduction and developing policies that support grazing as a viable component of California's wildfire-resilience strategy.

Sonja's environmental work is informed by a lifelong relationship with gardening and land stewardship. A daily gardener, she draws inspiration from regenerative agriculture, JADAM natural farming, and traditional and Indigenous approaches to working with ecological systems. This perspective informs her interest in climate policy that works with landscapes rather than against them.

Sonja holds a J.D. from UC Law San Francisco, where she completed a concentration in Social Justice Lawyering with an academic emphasis on environmental justice, climate change, and natural-resource law and policy. Her environmental-law coursework included Environmental Law & Statutory Analysis, Environmental Justice, Climate Change Law, Water Law, Cannabis Law, and related interdisciplinary study.

Her legal education included extensive research and analysis of environmental statutes and regulatory frameworks, including the Clean Air Act, federal environmental regulation, the Endangered Species Act, and statutory interpretation in the environmental-law context. Through coursework in environmental justice and climate change law, she also examined how environmental burdens, natural resources, climate adaptation, and legal institutions intersect with communities and questions of equity.

Sonja studied environmental and climate law under Professor David Owen and Emeritus Professor David Takacs. Her approach is also informed by Rebellious Lawyering, studied under Professor Gerald P. López, whose client-centered approach to public-interest lawyering emphasizes working alongside—and not merely on behalf of—the people and communities affected by legal systems.

This combination of environmental law, environmental justice, policy research, and community-centered lawyering informs Sonja's approach to climate work: centering both the health of the natural environment and the well-being, knowledge, and lived experiences of the people who depend upon it.