Memorial Service Announced for New York Law School Professor Denise C. Morgan
Contact: Altagracia Levat, Office of Public Affairs, 212.431.2325 or alevat@nyls.edu
NEW YORK, April 19, 2006 --- Memorial services have been announced for Professor Denise C. Morgan of New York Law School, who died on April 7, 2006 at age 41 at the University of Chicago Hospital of complications from pneumonia. The service will take place on Sunday, April 23 at 3:00 p.m. at the First Presbyterian Church in the City of New York, 12 West 12th Street (at Fifth Avenue). All are welcome who wish to join with Professor Morgan’s family and friends in remembering her life and mourning her loss. A reception at New York Law School will follow the service.
In lieu of flowers, gifts are welcome to a private educational fund established in Denise's memory to benefit her daughter Sylvan Wold. For more information about the fund, please contact Lisa Ferrari at lferrari@cplplaw.com.
Professor Morgan, who taught education policy and the law, federal courts, civil procedure, and a seminar on race and American history, was a passionate advocate of fiscal equity in public education in New York. She represented the Black, Puerto Rican and Hispanic Legislative Caucus, and filed several amicus briefs on behalf of the Caucus in a landmark case against New York State to establish equity in public school funding for New York City’s schoolchildren. The decade-long litigation, Campaign for Fiscal Equity, Inc. v. New York State, which began in 1993 as a constitutional challenge to the state’s method of financing public education, continues today as CFE seeks to force the state to comply with sweeping financing reforms ordered by New York's highest court in 2003.
Before joining the New York Law School faculty in 1995, Professor Morgan, who received both her B.A. and her J.D. from Yale University, clerked for the Honorable Marilyn Hall Patel, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, and then joined Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton as an associate. It was at Cleary that she started working on a pro bono case that inspired her research into public school finance litigation.
Professor Morgan wrote extensively about civil rights and equal educational opportunity, covering such topics as single-sex schools and desegregation law. Her most recent scholarly work focused on the role that the federal government plays in protecting individual rights, especially those rights that facilitate the belonging of outsiders in the national community. Professor Morgan argued that recent Supreme Court decisions would leave a detrimental impact on the enforcement of those rights. She was the author of numerous articles and principal editor of Awakening from the Dream: Civil Rights Under Siege and the New Struggle for Equal Justice (2005).
About New York Law School:
Founded in 1891, New York Law School is the second oldest independent law school in the United States. Drawing on its location near the centers of law, government, and finance in New York City, its faculty of noted and prolific scholars has built the school’s curricular strength in the areas of tax law, labor and employment law, civil and human rights law, media and information law, urban legal studies, international and comparative law, and interdisciplinary fields such as legal history and legal ethics. New York Law School has more than 11,000 graduates and enrolls some 1500 students in its full- and part-time J.D. program. It is one of only two law schools in the metropolitan area to offer the Master of Laws (LL.M.) in Taxation.
