Diane T. Chin oversees the John and Terry Levin Center for Public Service and Public Interest Law's career development, pro bono, externship, and mentoring programs. She also teaches, plans and coordinates public interest curriculum, and engages in external relations and fundraising. In 2007, she co-edited and contributed to Beyond the Big Firm: Profiles of Lawyers Who Want Something More, and she previously served as the Levin Center's founding director in 2003. Prior to her return to Stanford, Diane was the director of Equal Justice Works/West, the first regional office of that national organization, outside of its Washington, D.C., headquarters. Diane also served as associate director of the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice at the UC Berkeley School of Law and as the executive director for Chinese for Affirmative Action.

She began her law career as a staff attorney and Skadden Fellow for the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law of the Boston Bar Association when she graduated from Northeastern University School of Law, and then as a staff attorney for the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area. Later she worked as a housing attorney for Protection & Advocacy, Inc. and as a senior trial attorney for the Office of Citizen Complaints for the San Francisco Police Commission. Diane was an adjunct member of the New College of Law faculty (Race and the Law, Constitutional Law). Her substantive areas of practice have been within the civil rights field: hate violence, police misconduct, affirmative action and housing discrimination. At Stanford, she serves as a lecturer in law, teaching Lawyering for Social Change and other courses.