Reproductive Justice Clinic

The Birnbaum Women’s Leadership Center and NYU Law’s Reproductive Justice Clinic together represent the Law School’s unwavering commitment to gender equity and reproductive justice. With a shared commitment to advancing scholarship, innovating policy advocacy, and shaping the public discourse, the BWLC and the Clinic have forged several key collaborations.

Supporting NYU Law Students

• The Reproductive Justice Clinic’s student-attorneys partner with organizations across the country, including the BWLC’s ERA Project, to develop and execute meaningful legal impact projects.
• BWLC Executive Director Jennifer Weiss-Wolf leads an annual public writing workshop for Clinic students.
• The BWLC and the Clinic co-host a 1L reading group. In AY 2025-26, BWLC Visiting Fellow Lynn M. Paltrow ’83, founder of National Advocates for Pregnant Women (now Pregnancy Justice) and Clinic Director Sarah Wheeler are teaching, “What Does it Mean to Do Good Legal Work in this Historic U.S. Moment and Can Lawyers Ensure Justice Without Organizing?”

 Joint Programming

• The BWLC, Reproductive Justice Clinic, and Pregnancy Justice are partners on a multi-year project, Personhood and Pregnancy. In 2024, we held a closed-door strategy session for more than 80 movement leaders, followed by a public panel discussion. In 2025, we have teamed up with the NYU Review of Law and Social Change (RLSC), which will publish a special edition of its online journal, The Harbinger. (Join us on October 10, 2025, for a virtual symposium at which authors will present their articles.)
• We co-host book talks, film screenings, and other public events featuring best-selling authors – including Jessica Valenti (Abortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies, and the Truths We Use to Win) and Irin Carmon (Unbearable: Five Women and the Perils of Pregnancy in America) – and award winning filmmaker Nazrin Choudry (Red, White, and Blue). These events are open to the public, and bring together students, faculty, legal scholars, thought leaders, and advocates around today’s most pressing topics.

Remembering Sally Burns

Sarah E. (Sally) Burns, founder of the Reproductive Justice Clinic, passed away on September 11, 2025. She made enormous contributions to NYU Law, to public interest lawyering, to the field of reproductive justice – and to our own community, especially.

A member of the inaugural class of Georgetown Women’s Law and Public Policy fellows, Sally went on to serve as legal director of the National Organization for Women’s Legal Defense and Education Fund, where she adroitly used first-person-narrative amicus briefs, sometimes called “women’s voices briefs,” in Supreme Court cases concerning reproductive rights. 

Sally was also a trailblazing lawyer who persuaded courts to recognize sex discrimination and sexual harassment as harms that the law could remedy.

She joined NYU Law 35 years ago – and through her work as a clinical professor, shaped generations of students. She co-directed the Civil Rights Clinic, founded the Mediation Clinic, and taught in several others before creating and leading the Reproductive Justice Clinic for the past twelve years. Her vision anticipated a national movement that has since taken shape. She brought unmatched skill in grassroots lawyering, impact litigation, policy advocacy, and client representation to her teaching, and she shared those skills generously.

As anyone who crossed her path knows, Sally was a brilliant giant who stepped softly, loved and admired by many – colleagues across the Law School and beyond, former students, the staff and Board of Pregnancy Justice, where she served as chair, and countless others.