Lenni B. Benson
Distinguished Chair in Immigration and Human Rights Law
Founder and Senior Advisor, Safe Passage Project
Contact Information
T 212.431.2336
E lenni.benson@nyls.edu
Faculty Assistant
Jennifer Nelson
T 212.431.2124
E jennifer.nelson@nyls.edu
Education
Arizona State, J.D. 1983 cum laude, B.S. 1980 cum laude
Profile
Professor Lenni B. Benson has been teaching and writing in the field of immigration law since 1994. She is the Distinguished Chaired Professor of Immigration and Human Rights Law at New York Law School. She founded the Safe Passage Project, which recruits, trains, and mentors attorneys to assist unaccompanied youth who are facing deportation. The Safe Passage Project began as a law school pro bono project/clinic and is now a nonprofit with a staff of over 40 professionals housed at NYLS that partners with the School’s clinic. Safe Passage Project is currently assisting over 1,600 unaccompanied minors in New York. More than 500 pro bono attorneys are working with the Project.
After the United States left Afghanistan, Professor Benson became a Senior Fellow at Immigrant ARC to aid in developing resources to support the representation of Afghan people, both evacuated to the United States and those left behind. Immigrant ARC is a nonprofit organization that supports the work of more than 80 organizations in the State of New York. She also worked on other trainings and materials to expand representation before the Immigration Court. In the fall of 2022, she helped design and launch a court observation project where students and attorneys observe the conduct of hearings to try to assess and measure current needs for immigrants. She continues to support the Immigrant ARC collaborative by participating in roundtables and preparing continuing legal educational programs. For several years, Immigrant ARC has co-sponsored the NYLS Annual Asylum Conference held in early spring and chaired by Professor Benson.
Professor Benson has won national awards for her pro bono leadership and excellence in immigration teaching. She has served as a member of several national task forces on the needs of migrant youth, and has been a speaker for the federal government at national trainings. She also served as one of the founding steering committee members of the American Immigration Representation Project, formed in 2017 to expand pro bono representation of detained immigrants and part of the national Immigration Justice Campaign.
In 2012, she completed, with Russell Wheeler, a study of the immigration courts for the federal government’s Administrative Conference of the United States. She served as the chair of the Immigration and Nationality Law Committee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York from 2012 to the end of 2014.
Professor Benson is an emeritus trustee of the American Immigration Law Foundation (now the American Immigration Council), is a fellow of the American Bar Foundation, and served on the board of the Center for Human and Constitutional Rights. Her co-authored book, Immigration and Nationality Law: Problems and Strategies, was published by LexisNexis in 2013. The second edition was published in 2019, and a new edition was published in January 2025 by Carolina Academic Press. In addition to teaching at NYLS, she has also served as an adjunct professor at Fordham and Columbia Law Schools.
Professor Benson edited an academic volume of international essays with Professor Mary Crock of the University of Sydney entitled Protecting Migrant Children: In Search of Best Practice (Elgar Press, 2018). She will prepare a new book for Elgar Press in its Advanced Legal Studies Series on U.S. Immigration Law.
Professor Benson also teaches Civil Procedure, Constitutional Law, Administrative Law, and several advanced seminars ranging from asylum to business immigration. She also teaches a seminar, Law and the Good Society, that interweaves Utopian literature, philosophy, and “real-world” examples of using law to achieve Utopian visions.
She is admitted in Arizona (inactive) and California (active). She has been a member of the American Immigration Lawyers Association since 1984. She is a supporter and member of the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers’ Guild. For several years, she was the update editor of the NIPNLG Treatise, Immigration Law and Defense. She is a former partner in the international law firm of Bryan, Cave LLP, now Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner.
Courses
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