Clinics

Claudia Angelos, an authority on prisoners’ rights, is a member and past president of the board of the New York Civil Liberties Union, where she serves as general counsel and a national board and executive committee member of the American Civil Liberties Union. Angelos was a staff attorney at Prisoners’ Legal Services of New York and Greater Boston Legal Services before joining the NYU School of Law faculty in 1980. Angelos has supervised student litigation of more than 100 civil rights cases in federal trial and appellate courts in the Civil Rights Clinic, and also teaches the New York Civil Liberties and Racial Justice clinics. She is a board and executive committee member of the Clinical Legal Education Association and serves on the board of the Society of American Law Teachers. She was elected Phi Beta Kappa at Radcliffe College, earning a B.A. cum laude in 1971, and a J.D. cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1974.

Sarah Burns combines law with learning in social science to develop effective solutions for problems that institutions and communities face. Burns, at NYU School of Law since 1990, specializes in experiential learning, developing simulation and clinical courses in civil litigation, negotiation, mediation, dispute system design, policy advocacy, organizing, and systemic change as part of the Law School’s widely recognized Clinical Program. Burns began law practice as a litigating lawyer with the Washington, D.C., commercial law firm Covington & Burling. She cites representing industry associations in federal regulatory matters as “my first introduction as a lawyer to interest-based practice that is so central to all negotiation and coalition work—whether in for-profit or not-for-profit/NGO sectors.” Burns later moved into public interest civil rights practice, doing litigation, legislative, and policy advocacy work. She has worked on cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and on matters before Congress, but found discrimination law trial work among the most interesting, using social science research both to develop proof and systemic solutions. Burns graduated in 1979 from Yale Law School, where she edited the Yale Law Journal, and holds master’s degrees from Stanford University in sociology and the University of Oklahoma in human relations.

Alina Das ’05 joined the NYU School of Law faculty in 2011. Das co-teaches the Immigrant Rights Clinic, a leading institution in local and national struggles for immigrant rights. She and her students represent immigrants and community organizations in litigation at the agency, federal court, and Supreme Court levels, and in immigrant rights campaigns at the local, state, and national levels. In addition to her teaching, Das engages in scholarship on deportation and detention issues, particularly at the intersection of immigration and criminal law. Prior to joining the Law School faculty, Das clerked for Judge Kermit V. Lipez of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. In 2006, she received a Soros Justice Fellowship to work at the Immigrant Defense Project, where she engaged in strategic advocacy and litigation to address the immigration penalties associated with drug convictions and participation in alternatives to incarceration. She has co-taught the Immigrant Rights Clinic as a teaching fellow since 2008. Das graduated magna cum laude with a B.A. in government from Harvard University, and graduated cum laude from NYU School of Law as a Root-Tilden-Kern Scholar with a joint J.D. and M.P.A. from NYU’s Wagner School of Public Service.

For more than two decades, Paula Galowitz has concen-trated her teaching, scholarship, and bar association work on improving legal services for the indigent. Today she is widely known both as a clinical teacher and as an expert on civil legal services for indigent clients. A graduate of Brooklyn Law School, Galowitz clerked for Judge Jacob D. Fuchsberg of the New York State Court of Appeals before joining the civil division of the New York Legal Aid Society. In 1980, she came to NYU School of Law. Galowitz teaches in the Medical-Legal Advocacy Clinic, which employs a multidisciplinary and holistic approach to providing on-site legal advocacy assistance and training to medical providers. The clinic represents indigents in a wide variety of matters involving housing, government benefits, family law, immigration, education, and AIDS. Galowitz also teaches in the Community Development and Economic Justice Clinic, in which students provide legal services to grassroots community groups; in their fieldwork, the students represent clients in transactional matters and litigation cases. Galowitz also teaches a simulation course on civil litigation and has taught a seminar called Professional Responsibility in the Public Interest. She is currently on the board of trustees of the Interest on Lawyer Account Fund (IOLA) of the State of New York and on the board of directors of the Center for the Study of Applied Legal Education (CSALE).

One of the nation’s foremost experts on children’s rights and family law, Martin Guggenheim ’71 has taught at NYU School of Law, where he now co-directs the Family Defense Clinic, since 1973. From 1998 to 2002, he was director of Clinical and Advocacy Programs. Guggenheim has been an active litigator in the area of children and the law and has argued leading cases on juvenile delinquency and termination of parental rights in the U.S. Supreme Court. He is also a well-known scholar, having published more than 40 articles and book chapters, plus five books, including What’s Wrong with Children’s Rights (2005), on children and parents. His research has focused on adolescent abortion, First Amendment rights in schools, the role of counsel for children in court proceedings, and empirical research on child welfare practice, juvenile justice, and family law. As a student at NYU Law, he was an Arthur Garfield Hays Civil Liberties Scholar. After law school, Guggenheim worked at the Juvenile Rights Division of New York City’s Legal Aid Society and later for the Juvenile Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation.

Randy Hertz came to NYU School of Law in 1985 as one of the first to join the new clinical tenure track. A graduate of Stanford Law School, where he was the articles and symposium editor of the Law Review, he clerked for Robert F. Utter, chief justice of the Washington Supreme Court, and later worked at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, where he handled criminal trials and appeals. Hertz is an editor-in-chief of NYU Law’s Clinical Law Review, the first scholarly journal to focus on clinical legal education and one of the few peer-edited law reviews in the country. Hertz regularly works pro bono on briefs in criminal appeals, including capital appeals and habeas corpus proceedings. He is the co-author of a two-volume book on habeas corpus that is regularly used by practicing lawyers and routinely cited by judges. And, together with University Professor Anthony Amsterdam and Law School Professor Martin Guggenheim, he wrote a trial manual on juvenile court practice that is the leading work for lawyers who handle juvenile delinquency or child protection cases. Hertz teaches the Juvenile Defender Clinic and Criminal Litigation.

Holly Maguigan teaches a criminal defense clinic and another on comparative criminal justice, as well as a seminar on global public-service lawyering and a course on evidence. She is an expert on the criminal trials of battered women. Her research and teaching are interdisciplinary. Of particular importance in her litigation and scholarship are the obstacles to fair trials experienced by people accused of crimes who are not part of the dominant culture. Maguigan is a member of the Family Violence Prevention Fund’s National Advisory Committee on Cultural Considerations in Domestic Violence Cases. She serves on the boards of directors of the National Clearinghouse for the Defense of Battered Women, MADRE, and the William Moses Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice. Maguigan is a past co-president of the Society of American Law Teachers, the largest membership organization of law professors in the United States.

Nancy Morawetz ’81 joined the NYU School of Law faculty in 1987. Morawetz teaches the Immigrant Rights Clinic, an innovative program that combines litigation and nonlitigation work on behalf of individual immigrants and community-based organizations. Clinic students appear in immigration court, federal district court, and the federal courts of appeals, and they assist in Supreme Court briefs. They also work on community-based advocacy with agencies and legislative bodies at the city, state, and national levels. In addition to her teaching, Morawetz engages in scholarship focused on detention, deportation, and judicial review. Prior to joining the Law School faculty, Morawetz clerked for Judge Patricia M. Wald of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and served as a staff attorney with the Civil Appeals Unit of the Legal Aid Society of New York for five years. Morawetz is an active participant in pro bono activities concerning immigration law, including serving as the chair of the Supreme Court Immigration Law Working Group and participating in pro bono litigation. She received the 2007 Daniel Levy Memorial Award for Outstanding Achievement in Immigration Law, the 2009 Albert Podell Distinguished Teaching Award, and the 2011 Elmer Fried Excellence in Teaching Award.

Smita Narula’s scholarship and clinical work focus on key human rights issues, including the impact of economic globalization and counterterrorism policies on human rights, and the accountability of corporations and international financial institutions for human rights abuses. She has authored numerous articles and human rights studies on these subjects. In 2008, Narula was appointed legal adviser to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. Her current research on the subject critically assesses market- and rights-based responses to the global phenomenon of agricultural “land grabbing.” Narula is a world-renowned expert on caste discrimination, and author of the award-winning book Broken People: Caste Violence Against India’s “Untouchables” (1999). She was the recipient of the 2007 South Asian Bar Association of New York Access to Justice Award and the 2008 North American South Asian Bar Association Public Interest Achievement Award, both given in recognition of her work on human rights in the United States and abroad. Before joining NYU School of Law in 2003, Narula spent six years at Human Rights Watch as the organization’s lead India researcher and senior researcher for South Asia. Narula graduated from Harvard Law School, where she was editor-in-chief of the Harvard Human Rights Journal, and she received a master’s in international development from Brown University.

Laura Sager focuses on employment and housing discrimination law and on training law students in litigation skills. As a clinical professor at NYU School of Law, she has been lead counsel, assisted by clinic students, in significant class actions challenging discrimination in the workplace, including a landmark case that invalidated New York City’s entry-level test for firefighters and enabled women to serve as firefighters for the first time in the city’s history. In recent years, students in her clinic have honed their litigation skills in cases challenging discrimination in housing opportunities as well as sexual and racial harassment, age discrimination, and disability discrimination in the workplace. After graduating from Wellesley College, Sager received an M.A. in history from Harvard University and a J.D. from UCLA School of Law. She clerked for Judge Irving Hill in the Central District of California and then spent several years as a litigator in New York before joining the Law School faculty. Sager’s latest research interest has focused on the taxation of damage awards and attorneys’ fees in civil rights actions.

Margaret Satterthwaite’s research interests include human rights and counterterrorism, economic and social rights, and empirical methods in human rights. Satterthwaite graduated magna cum laude from NYU School of Law in 1999 and served as a law clerk to Judge Betty B. Fletcher of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in 1999-00 and to the judges of the International Court of Justice in 2001-02. She has worked for a variety of human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, Human Rights First, and the Commission Nationale de Verité et de Justice (Haitian Truth and Justice Commission), and has authored or co-authored more than a dozen human rights reports. She has engaged in human rights work in countries such as Haiti, Nigeria, Northern Ireland, the United States, and Yemen. Satterthwaite has served as a human rights consultant and advising expert to U.N. agencies and special rapporteurs and has been a member of the boards of directors of several human rights organizations, including Amnesty International USA and the Global Initiative on Economic and Social Rights.

A 1985 graduate of Harvard, with both a master’s in public policy from the Kennedy School of Government and a J.D. from the law school, Bryan Stevenson joined the clinical faculty at NYU School of Law in 1998. Stevenson has been representing capital defendants and death row prisoners in the Deep South since 1985, when he was a staff attorney with the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta. In 1989, he founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit law organization that focuses on social justice and human rights in the context of criminal justice reform in the United States. He is still executive director and has recently challenged extreme sentences imposed on young children in several cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. Stevenson’s work has won him national acclaim, including the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, the Olof Palme Prize for international human rights, and awards from the National Association of Public Interest Lawyers, the American College of Trial Lawyers, and the National Lawyers Guild. In 2006, NYU presented Stevenson with its Distinguished Teaching Award. He has also received honorary degrees from several universities, including Yale University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Georgetown University Law Center.

Kim Taylor-Thompson teaches courses related to criminal law and community and criminal defense. Her teaching and scholarship focus on the impact of race and gender on public policy—particularly criminal and juvenile justice policy—and the need to prepare lawyers to meet the demands of practice in and on behalf of subordinated communities. In 2012, Taylor-Thompson received the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Faculty Award. Taylor-Thompson has recently returned from leave, having served for three years as the chief executive officer of Duke Corporate Education, ranked by Financial Times as the number one global provider of customized executive education. She worked with Fortune 500 companies and governments and taught in numerous programs focusing on translating and executing strategy and leading in complex environments. Prior to joining NYU School of Law, Taylor-Thompson was an associate professor of law at Stanford, where she received the John Hurlburt Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Outstanding Teaching Award. Before academia, Taylor-Thompson spent a decade at the D.C. Public Defender Service, ultimately serving as its director. She is a frequent moderator of Socratic dialogues at academic conferences. Taylor-Thompson received her J.D. from Yale Law School and her B.A. from Brown University.