Richard Marsico
Professor of Law
Codirector, Justice Action Center
Director, Economic Justice Project

Specialty: Anti-Discrimination Law and Economic Justice

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Professor Marsico practiced poverty law in the South Bronx for the Legal Aid Society before joining the faculty at New York Law School. His clients have included tenant associations, public assistance recipients, and community groups seeking bank investment in these low-income neighborhoods. His scholarly interests include lending discrimination and community reinvestment, and he is currently completing a book on the subject. He is a member of the board of directors of the Washingtonville Housing Alliance, a not-for-profit developer of affordable housing.

Susan Abraham
Professor of Law

Specialties: Criminal Law, Social Change Advocacy

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Professor Abraham began her public interest work as a VISTA Volunteer in Tampa, Florida, where she assisted women inmates seeking housing, employment, and education upon their release. After law school, she worked as a public defender in Trenton, New Jersey, and continued representing indigent criminal defendants on appeal in both New Jersey and New York City, where she was a supervising attorney at the Office of the Appellate Defender, training new lawyers. She has also represented employees alleging employment discrimination, and has been involved in projects involving women’s rights, reproductive rights, and educational reform.

Deborah N. Archer
Professor of Law
Director, Racial Justice Project

Specialty: Anti-Discrimination Law and Economic Justice, Civil Rights

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An expert in the areas of civil rights and racial discrimination, Professor Archer directs the Law School’s Racial Justice Project. Professor Archer was previously an assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., where she was involved in a number of important civil rights cases in the areas of voting rights, employment discrimination, and educational equity. She was also a Marvin H. Karpatkin Fellow with the American Civil Liberties Union, where she was involved in federal and state litigation on issues of race and poverty. Prior to joining New York Law School, Professor Archer was an associate at Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett LLP. She is currently on the National Board of Directors of the American Civil Liberties Union and the Board of the New York Civil Liberties Union. Her scholarly interests include educational equity and affirmative action.

Lenni B. Benson
Professor of Law
Codirector, Safe Passage Immigration Project

Specialty: Immigration Law

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Professor Benson practiced immigration law for twelve years at an international law firm, where she represented both businesses and individuals in U.S. immigration law matters, and where she assisted clients seeking asylum status. Her ongoing scholarly pursuits focus on immigrant rights and political asylum, and she is as an active member of the board of the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law and a trustee for the American Immigration Law Foundation.

Robert Blecker
Professor of Law

Specialty: Criminal Law and Death Penalty

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Robert Blecker teaches criminal law. His principal interest is the death penalty and he takes an active part in the national debate urging its retention but only for the worst of the worst.

Elise C. Boddie
Associate Professor of Law
Associate Director, Racial Justice Project

Specialty: Anti-Discrimination Law and Economic Justice, Civil Rights

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Professor Boddie practiced civil rights litigation before she entered academia. She was an associate director of litigation at the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc. and directed its Education Program. She litigated at the trial and appellate levels in the areas of affirmative action, employment, school desegregation, and economic justice. Professor Boddie was also the first recipient of the Fried Frank/NAACP-LDF fellowship.

Jean Marie Brescia
Adjunct Professer

Specialty: Special Education Law

Jean Marie Brescia is Town Justice for Mamaroneck, Westchester County, and has served as a hearing officer in special education proceedings since 1995. Professor Brescia was a staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society from 1988 through 1994, working in the Civil Division and in the Appeals Bureau of the Juvenile Rights Division.

Frank Bress
Professor of Law

Specialty: Criminal Law

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Professor Bress taught for twelve years in NYU Law School's clinical program, after which he went on to launch the clinical education program at Pace Law School. Prior to his work in education, he spent more than a decade in private practice, including white-collar criminal defense and commercial and tort litigation. In addition to his leading role in New York Law School's clinical program, Professor Bress currently cochairs the Criminal Justice section of the New York County Lawyers Association ("NYCLA"), chairs a NYCLA Task Force on Penal Policy, and is a member of the Criminal Courts Committee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York.

Lindsay Curcio
Adjunct Professor
Codirector, Safe Passage Immigration Project

Specialty: Immigration Law

Professor Curcio has practiced in all areas of immigration law since 1990. She teaches the advanced immigration law seminar with Dean Lenni Benson. Professor Curcio also supervises student externships in immigration law and sometimes teaches the immigration law survey course. She is codirector of the Safe Passage Immigration Project, providing training in special immigrant juvenile status to volunteer lawyers and students and coordinating pro bono representation for unrepresented children in immigration proceedings. She is an active member of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, where she has served as a Media Committee Chair since 2005. She was awarded a bachelor's degree in Spanish from Northwestern University, a Juris Doctor degree from Chicago Kent College of Law, and a master's degree in business administration from Fordham University.

Stephen J. Ellmann
Professor of Law
Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Collaborative Learning
Chair, Clinical Theory Workshops
Cochair, South Africa Reading Group
Coeditor, Clinical Research Institute

Specialties: Civil Liberties, Social Change Advocacy

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An award-winning author on legal ethics and an expert in clinical legal education, constitutional law, and South African law, Stephen J. Ellmann also pursues his deep interest in legal education through his work as Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Collaborative Learning. He chairs the Collaborative Learning Advisory Team, a faculty committee working on developing new curricular programs focused on preparing New York Law School students for the challenges of the world of legal practice today. As a clinical scholar, he has written extensively on the skills and ethics of lawyers’ interviewing and counseling of clients. He has also written extensively on human rights in South Africa, both under apartheid and in the newly democratic nation that has followed the end of apartheid. Since the September 11 attacks he has focused much of his work on issues of war and emergency power.

Kris Franklin
Associate Professor of Law
Director, Academic Skills Program

Specialties: Anti-Discrimination Law and Economic Justice, LGBT Rights, Family Law

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Professor Franklin's scholarship focuses on the rhetoric of legal decision making, with her published works mirroring her political interests in gender roles, diverse family structures, and sexual identity. Her social justice work has encompassed the full spectrum of activism, from grass roots and direct action campaigns as an undergraduate, to her four years as a staff attorney in the Brooklyn Office of the Legal Aid Society and as a union delegate for the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys, to her current work as an academic. Dedicated to training the next generation of advocates, Professor Franklin also serves as Director of the law school's Academic Skills Program.

Anne Goldstein
Professor of Law
Director, First-year Legal Skills Program

Specialties: Anti-Discrimination Law, Labor and Employment Law

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Professor Goldstein's teaching draws on her experience as a practitioner and emphasizes pro bono legal service. She received the Connecticut Bar Association's 2007 Pro Bono Award and the University of Connecticut Public Interest Law Group's first annual Cornelius J. Scanlon Award for her work "encouraging the practice of public interest law." Prior to academia, she represented individual employees and unions in employment and labor matters. As director of the Law School's new First-year Legal Skills Program, Professor Goldstein will design curriculum and hire faculty to teach a new skills course, slated to begin in fall 2010, aimed at deepening students' mastery of legal analysis and at introducing them to the application of their analytical and communicates skills in legal writing, oral advocacy, interviewing, and counseling.

Lawrence M. Grosberg
Professor of Law
Director, Lawyering Skills Center
Codirector, Elder Law Clinic

Specialties: Social Change Advocacy

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Seth D. Harris
Professor of Law
Director, Labor and Employment Law Program

Specialties: Anti-Discrimination Law, Labor & Employment Law

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Professor Seth Harris spent nearly seven years at the United States Department of Labor as a senior advisor to both of President Clinton's Secretaries of Labor on policy, legal, management, and strategy issues. Professor Harris, who teaches Employment Discrimination Law, Labor Relations Law, and Problem-Solving & the Law of the Workplace, still maintains close contacts in Washington, D.C. and relishes enriching his teaching and legal scholarship with an understanding of politics and public policy. His scholarship examines the intersection of economics and the law of the workplace. He also serves as New York Law School's Director of Labor & Employment Law Programs.

Mariana Hogan
Professor of Law
Associate Dean for Professional Development
Director, Externship Program

Specialty: Criminal Law

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Professor Hogan’s practical experience with the Criminal Law started in clinical programs in law school and intensified after graduation, when she worked for four years as a staff attorney in the Legal Aid Society's Criminal Defense Division in the South Bronx on a caseload that included everything but homicide. She continued as a staff attorney in Legal Aid's Federal Defender Services Unit in Brooklyn. She applies this early experience to her work at New York Law School, where she heads up the law school’s Externship Program. She has also maintained strong ties to the social justice community, including past work as cochair of the New York County Lawyers’ Association Task Force on the Representation of the Indigent, and as cosponsor of the Annual Federal Criminal Practice Institute.

Molly Land
Associate Professor of Law

Specialty: Intellectual Property Law and Human Rights

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Drawing on her human rights expertise and background as an IP litigator, Professor Land’s scholarship focuses on access to knowledge and the intersection of intellectual property and human rights. Her recent work investigates the role of cultural rights and technology in achieving democratic objectives and the respective responsibilities of states and international institutions in that process.

Arthur S. Leonard
Professor of Law

Specialties: Labor & Employment Law, Anti-Discrimination Law

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Professor Arthur Leonard, who focused on labor and employment law as a practitioner before joining the NY Law School faculty, has developed a specialty in lesbian and gay rights law. He edits the nation's only comprehensive newsletter on lesbian/gay/transgender/HIV legal issues, with assistance from NYLS students, and also explains new developments to a non-legal audience through regular articles in Gay City News. He teaches labor and employment law courses, as well as advanced torts and first-year Contracts. He also serves as a trustee of the Jewish Board of Family and Children's Services of New York, the nation's largest and most comprehensive voluntary agency providing mental health and family counseling services through the NYC metro area.

Carlin Meyer
Professor of Law

Specialties: Anti-Discrimination Law, Family Law, Labor & Employment Law

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Carlin Meyer practiced employment law for 13 years, first in a private firm, then for a union, and thereafter as head of the Labor Bureau of the NYS Attorney General's office. She was recently appointed by the Attorney General to represent him in enforcing a labor code for greengrocers. She is a past president of the NYC Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild and remains active in that organization, as well as in feminist legal organizations.

Frank W. Munger
Professor of Law

Specialty: Poverty Law and Economic Justice

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Frank Munger teaches about poverty, economic justice, local government, and constitutional law. His research often combines analysis of legal policy with ethnographic and quantitative methods of inquiry. He is studying the new administrative state—a combination of entrepreneurial administration with devolution of policy making, privatization of public services, and other market-inspired changes—through a case study of welfare administration in New York City and Buffalo. He is also studying economic change in Southeast Asia and is in the final stages of a historical study of law and change in early West Virginia. Together with colleagues, he is writing a casebook on local government law that will emphasize issues of economic justice and democratic accountability. Recent publications include studies of poverty and welfare, a book on identity and disability rights (Rights of Inclusion: Law and Identity in the Life Stories of Americans With Disabilities, written with David Engel, a Professor at SUNY Buffalo Law School), and an edited volume of ethnography and commentary on low-wage labor (Laboring Below the Line: The New Ethnography of Poverty, Low-Wage Labor, and Survival in the Global Economy). He is a Past President of the Law and Society Association and former general editor of the Law & Society Review.

Udi Ofer
Adjunct Professer

Specialties: Anti-Discrimination Law, Civil Rights Law, Social Change Advocacy

Udi Ofer is the Advocacy Director at the New York Civil Liberties Union, where he is responsible for overseeing the NYCLU’s work to influence public policy in the areas of education, immigration, and national security. He is responsible for supervising the NYCLU’s work to ensure that school safety practices uphold the constitutional rights of students. He drafted the Student Safety Act, which would provide for oversight and accountability of police practices in New York City schools. He also oversees campaigns to pass comprehensive immigration reform, and ensure adequate oversight of military recruitment practices in public schools. Ofer is a graduate of Fordham University School of Law, where he was a Stein Scholar in Public Interest Law and Ethics, and a Crowley Advocate in International Human Rights. After graduating law school, he received the prestigious Skadden Fellowship. As a fellow, he worked at My Sisters’ Place, a domestic violence organization in Westchester County, where he initiated the organization’s immigration practice. In 2007, he received the “Distinguished Graduate Award” from Fordham Law School’s Stein Scholars Program.

Michael L. Perlin
Professor of Law
Director, International Mental Disability Law Reform Project
Director, Online Mental Disability Law Program

Specialty: Mental Disability Law

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Michael Perlin, formerly director of the NJ Division of Mental Health Advocacy, now teaches five mental disability law courses at NYLS, and has created the first and only on-line distance learning mental disability law course (being offered both domestically and internationally). He has written over a dozen books and 150 articles on all aspects of mental disability law, and is now focusing primarily on the connections between mental disability law and international human rights law.

Edward A. Purcell Jr.
Joseph Solomon Distinguished Professor of Law

Specialty: Civil Rights and Federal Courts

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Professor Purcell practiced law in New York City where he did extensive work with The Legal Aid Society and served as his firm's pro bono coordinator. He was a member of the board of directors of Lawyers for Legal Aid as well as the Legal Aid Society's Community Law Office, and he is currently serving as an advisor to the Society and the Association of the Bar of the City of New York on a project involving the legal representation of the poor in the New York City Housing Court. He teaches civil procedure, federal courts, and civil rights law, and much of his scholarly writing focuses on the impact of social inequality on the legal process.

David Schoenbrod
Trustee Professor of Law

Specialty: Environmental Law

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A pioneer in the field of environmental law, David Schoenbrod was at the forefront of environmental justice. As staff attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council during the 1970s, he led the charge to get lead out of gasoline. Now, his concern has turned to Congress evading accountability to voters. In his current scholarship, Professor Schoenbrod asserts that Congress has inappropriately shifted its responsibility for the laws to regulatory agencies and courts. His widely-praised book, Power Without Responsibility: How Congress Abuses the People Through Delegation (Yale University Press, 1993), was the genesis for the 1996 Congressional Review Act, which deals with agency regulations. He has continued to focus attention on this issue as co-author of the book Democracy by Decree: What Happens When Courts Run Government. His academic career has included positions at Yale Law School (1977) and New York University School of Law (1979-82). In addition to his current position at New York Law School, Professor Schoenbrod serves as an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. He contributes frequently to the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and other newspapers and periodicals.

Nadine Strossen
Professor of Law
President, American Civil Liberties Union

Specialty: Civil Liberties Law

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Since 1991, Professor Strossen has served as President of the American Civil Liberties Union, the nation's oldest and largest civil liberties organization. She leads the ACLU's advocacy in many forums, including the Supreme Court, Congress, and the national media. She also has held leading positions in many other civil liberties and international human rights organizations, including as a member of the Executive Committee of Human Rights Watch and the Advisory Board of the National Coalition Against Censorship. Professor Strossen writes regularly for both scholarly and general interest publications, focusing on free speech and privacy issues, and more recently on the essential challenge of maintaining both personal liberty and national security. The University of Chicago Press recently invited her to serve as General Editor of a series of books on civil liberties issues.