UDC Law’s Clinicians, all tenured or tenure-track Professors of Law, not only work daily to practice law, promote justice and change lives with our students but they also take the time to advocate for systemic change through scholarship, media appearances, training and other advocacy.
Professor Andrew Budzinski, Co-Director of the General Practice Clinic, focuses his scholarship on access to justice for self-represented litigants in state courts. Specifically, he writes about how court rules disadvantage litigants without counsel and how those rules can be modified to maximize procedural fairness. He has served as a Faculty Presenter for the District of Columbia Bar’s Continuing Legal Education class on civil protection order litigation and edits the Bar’s Practice Manual chapter on domestic violence. In 2022, Prof. Budzinski collaborated with Deborah Epstein and Catherine Klein to Co-author a portion of the D.C. Bar’s Practice Manual. He published Overhauling Rules of Evidence in Pro Se Courts with the Richmond Law Review. His works in progress include a co-authored piece with Rachel Camp, Vantage Point Analysis: Centering Context in the Pedagogy of Teaching Family Violence, along with a piece titled Clinics, Clients, and the Cloud: Protecting Clinic Client Data in the Age of Technology, which he workshopped recently at the NYU Clinical Writers Workshop and the Mid-Atlantic Workshop.
Prof. Budzinski ended his more than three-year term serving as a coordinator for the Mid-Atlantic Clinicians’ writing workshop in May 2022 and continues to serve as a board member for the Washington Council of Lawyers and as Assistant Director of Training for the DC Affordable Law Firm. Prof. Budzinski is deeply engaged in the DC advocacy community for survivors of intimate partner violence, serving as a member of the DC Domestic Violence Advocates, the D.C. Domestic Violence Division Rules Advisory Committee and the D.C. Domestic Violence Division Strategic Planning Committee. In January 2022, he led efforts to permit service by electronic methods in Domestic Violence Cases in D.C. and also testified before the D.C. Council to support expanding fee waivers for low-income litigants.
Professor Tianna Gibbs, Co-Director of the General Practice Clinic, has continued to focus her scholarship on access to justice issues that impact litigants in high-volume courts, particularly courts handling family law and domestic violence matters. Professor Gibbs received the 2022 Junior Faculty Award from the Society of American Law Teachers (SALT).
Professor Gibbs’ piece, Using Experiential Learning to Create an Inclusive Classroom, Promote Equity, and Develop Professional Identity, was published with the Family Court Review in October 2022. This Article outlines a pedagogical approach that uses experiential learning to create an inclusive family law classroom, promote equity and prepare students for law practice through the development of knowledge, skills and professional identity. The Article describes and analyzes a series of short in-class exercises designed to teach third-party custody doctrine and build multiple foundational lawyering skills – such as statutory interpretation, client interviewing, client-centered lawyering and oral advocacy – in a single class session.
She is also working on four additional pieces to be published in 2023: Right-Sized Access to Protection for the University of Missouri-Kansas City Law Review, a chapter titled Lessons from Pandemic Co-Parenting: Towards Family Mediation that Centers Low-income, Never-Married Black Mothers, which will appear in the Routledge Companion to Gender and COVID-19, a piece for a family violence symposium at UVA that will be published in the Virginia Journal of Social Policy & the Law and a chapter for the forthcoming volume edited by Dean Harris and Mallika Kaur titled How to Navigate Trauma and Emotions in Law Teaching.
Associate Dean for Clinical and Experiential Programs, Professor Lindsay M. Harris, Director of the Immigration and Human Rights Clinic, continues to engage in scholarship. In Fall 2021, she published the results of her National Asylum Attorney Burnout and Secondary Trauma Survey in the Wake Forest Law Review. She has spoken about this work with students at Georgetown, Vanderbilt and Penn State and for the ABA Commission on Immigration in a webinar titled The Lifeguard is Drowning: Identifying and Combating Burnout and Secondary Trauma in Asylum Practitioners. Building on this work, Dean Harris is co-editing How to Account for Trauma and Emotions in Legal Teaching with Mallika Kaur, forthcoming in 2023 with Edward Elgar Publishing and including a chapter authored by UDC Law Professor Tianna Gibbs.
Dean Harris has a piece forthcoming with the Howard Law Journal, Afghan Allies in Limbo: The U.S. Immigration Response. She also has a forthcoming commentary on a rewritten feminist judgement of the 1993 Supreme Court Reno v. Flores decision in the Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Immigration Law Opinions. Finally, Dean Harris co-authored a chapter, A Child-Centered Approach to Representing Children in the U.S. Immigration Legal System, with Laila L. Hlass, to be published in The Handbook of Migrant Children and the Child-Centered Approach, an edited volume published by Oxford University Press in 2023.
Dean Harris continues her advocacy for asylum seekers. In the last year, she has been particularly focused on Afghan evacuees. The ABA Journal profiled Dean Harris’ work in Afghan Evacuee Crisis Adds Pressure for Already-Stressed Immigration Attorneys, and Professor Harris wrote a blog posting for the American Immigration Lawyers Association on the Immigration and Human Rights Clinic’s Afghan cases in January 2022. She has spoken about her work to mobilize law students in response to the Afghan Crisis at the AALS Conference and the AALS Clinical Conference. Dean Harris currently serves on the AILA National Afghan Response Task Force and has spoken about preparing Afghan asylum cases for the Federal Bar Association’s Annual conference and the ABA and HIAS Afghan Asylum Webinar Series. This summer, Dean Harris taught a declaration drafting and storytelling webinar to law student interns all over the country and taught a similar session at DC Affordable Law Firm for incoming fellows this Fall. She was a plenary panelist at the Immigration Law Teachers and Scholars Workshop, a panelist at William and Mary Law School’s Inaugural Fourth Circuit Asylum Law Conference and a panelist for the Georgetown Immigration Law Journal’s #ImmigrationAndHumanRights event. She appeared in the “How to Build a Career in Human Rights” episode of the podcast, Career Unicorns.
Professor Jerome Hughes, Director of the Community Development Law Clinic focuses his current research on the role of enterprise law, including federal tax law in structuring cooperatives, employee ownership and social enterprise and in addressing inequality and poverty. In a recently submitted article, Envisioning IRC 501(c)(3) Social Impact Cooperatives: Addressing Poverty and Inequality, Advancing Democracy, Prof. Hughes analyzes the possibility of extending recognition under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code to cooperatives consisting of primarily low-income and disadvantaged populations in order to achieve the exempt purpose of addressing poverty. Prof. Hughes presented this piece in October 2022 at the NYU Clinical Writers Workshop.
Professor Marcy Karin, Jack and Lovell Olender Professor of Law and Director of the Legislation/Civil Rights Clinic, is serving as the Fulbright Scotland Distinguished Scholar with the University of Edinburgh during her sabbatical for academic year 2022-2023. Prof. Karin will work on a project titled Menstrual Justice at Work and School: Public Policy Lessons from Scotland’s Period Products Law. This builds on the Legislation/Civil Rights Clinic’s client work, including the materials captured in this Menstrual Policies and the Bar repository. Prof. Karin also co-authored Bar Exam Policies on Menstruation Still Fall Short with Margaret Johnson and Elizabeth Cooper, published by Law360 over the summer, and a Ms. Magazine piece with Margaret Johnson, Now More Than Ever, It’s Time for Universal Menstrual Education for Gender Equality. Finally, Professor Karin published Addressing Periods at Work with the Harvard Law and Policy Review and has a co-authored piece forthcoming in the Michigan Journal of Gender and Law in 2023 titled Title IX and “Menstruation or Related Conditions. In the past year, Prof. Karin was an invited speaker about “Interdisciplinary Approaches for Advancing Access to Justice” as part of the White House Counsel’s Series on Building the Next Generation of Public Interest Lawyers. She also spoke about public policy to support menstrual justice at work, in school, in detention and in public spaces in Scotland, Portugal, New York and virtually, including testimony before the D.C. Council in support of the PERIOD Act, which was co-authored by UDC Law students Stella Iweh and Beth Brodsky.
Professor Jacqueline Laínez Flanagan founded the UDC Law School Tax Clinic in December 2005 and is teaching a new section of the Clinic focused on Tax Policy in Spring 2023. Her legal scholarship, community service, professional presentations and media appearances have largely focused on the intersection between taxation and immigration, human rights and corporate accountability.
Professor Laínez Flanagan provided information for Maximizing Direct Cash Transfers to Youth Experiencing Homelessness: Tax Implications (published by Chapin Hall, U. Chi. 2022), a toolkit on cash transfers for youth and young adults. She presented on Taxing Direct Cash Transfers at the 2022 Inaugural Graciela Olivárez Latinas in the Legal Academy (“GO LILA”) Workshop at Stanford Law School in June 2022. She was a speaker on Incorporating Clinical Lessons in the Broader Law School Curriculum at the 2022 AALS Conference on Clinical Education. Professor Laínez Flanagan appeared as an Expert Commentator for the 2022 WalletHub Tax Survey and Expert Presenter on Tax Implications of Direct Cash Transfers through Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago in January 2022.
Professor Ieshaah Murphy, new faculty member and Director of the Criminal Law Clinic, focuses her scholarship on indigent defense reform, criminal law and procedure and racial equity. Her work in progress is tentatively titled The Antiracist Defender. In the article, Prof. Murphy argues that reforming indigent defense necessarily involves building public defender offices that are antiracist. She proposes concrete priorities for any defender office aiming to be antiracist. Prof. Murphy regularly trains practicing attorneys on issues related to trial advocacy, criminal law and procedure and race equity. In the last year, as a public defender and national trainer, Prof. Murphy was part of a team of subject matter experts working together to revise the Defender Training and Development Standards created by the National Legal Aid and Defender Association (NLADA) in 1997. Most recently, Prof. Murphy trained public defender leaders at NLADA conference in October 2022, leading trainings on Adult Learning Theory and Facilitating Conversations about Race. Prof. Murphy recently returned from Missouri where she helped train public defender leaders across the state on how to be effective antiracist trainers.
Professor Saleema Snow, a long-time faculty member, is now directing the Youth Justice Clinic. Through a critical race theory lens, Prof. Snow’s scholarship continues to focus on youth justice, gender equity and the intersection of poverty, gender and access to justice. Her recent article, Transportation, The Hidden Right to Exclude is forthcoming in the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law. Her most recent publication, Veiling and Inverted Masking, in the Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law, & Justice, highlights the adverse effect of masked identity, particularly for Muslim women.
Immediately before joining the clinical program, Prof. Snow spent her Spring 2022 sabbatical representing clients at Advocates for Justice in Education in various special education matters, including school suspensions to plug the school-to-prison pipeline. While designing the Youth Justice Clinic, Prof. Snow joined the board of the ACLU of DC. As part of the ACLU program, “Reflections of Justice in our City,” Prof. Snow was a panelist in the post-show discussion of the Till Trilogy play: The Ballad of Emmett Till, focusing on the racialized juvenile system.
Prof. Snow has been strategizing with her students to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline, including targeting the role of the judiciary. She shared her perspective on reimagining juvenile justice with judges from Bahrain who were visiting on behalf of the U.S. Department of State. She also shared her insight at the National Association of Administrative Law Judiciary conference, leading a panel on implicit bias in administrative hearings and its impact on litigants’ ability to trust the justice system.
Professor Sakinah Tillman, new faculty member and Director of the Tax Clinic, served as the President of the Monumental City Bar Association from 2021-2022. She spoke this Fall for the American Bar Association and the ABA’s Commission on Immigration on the widely attended webinar Taxigration: What You Always Wanted to Know about the Intersection between Tax and Immigration law Webinar. During this webinar, the panelist explored the term taxigration as it relates to individuals who are undocumented, asylums, refugees, temporary visitors and workers, students and investors and how the tax compliance may impact future immigration benefits. This fall, Prof. Tillman spoke at the NLADA Annual Conference in Arlington, Virginia, about preparing students to provide pro bono and other legal services. Professor Tillman was also a guest speaker at the Court of Maryland Appeals Bar Admission Ceremony in June 2022.
