Kauffman has been a civil rights litigator specializing in the education, voting, and employment rights of Latinos. For nearly 20 years, Kauffman was the senior litigating attorney for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) in San Antonio.

As a MALDEF attorney, Kauffman was the lead attorney for plaintiffs in the Texas school finance cases, for Latino plaintiffs in the Texas Higher Education System finance and desegregation case, and in litigation challenging the state’s use of the TAAS test for graduation from Texas high schools. He has also litigated affirmative action cases, local and state voting rights, employment discrimination cases, immigration cases, and hospital admission policy cases.

After MALDEF, he served as a Senior Legal and Policy Advocate Associate for the Civil Rights Project at Harvard Law School. Subsequently, he served as the Senior Legal Policy Advocate at the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Race, Ethnicity and Diversity at the University of California at Berkeley. While there, he wrote about civil rights issues such as voting rights, No Child Left Behind, affirmative action, and public schools’ student assignment systems.

Kauffman was part of a small team of experts involved with passing both the state’s top 10 percent rule for admission to public universities and recent changes to admission and scholarship criteria for public graduate and professional schools.