After decades of knowing the Law School by reputation, the nationally recognized scholar and clinician reflects on teaching in a classroom where students arrive prepared to engage law through critical analysis, lived experience, and practice.
Professor Jayesh Rathod has spent decades training public interest lawyers and shaping how immigration, labor, and employment law are taught and practiced. A Professor of Law and former Associate Dean for Experiential Education at American University Washington College of Law (AUWCL), he has led clinical programs, published widely across leading law journals, and built a career that spans scholarship, teaching, and direct representation of immigrant communities in courts and administrative tribunals and has been recognized nationally for his teaching, including the Society of American Law Teachers’ Great Teacher Award in 2023.
He arrived at CUNY School of Law this spring with a clear sense of the institution’s place in legal education—not only through its reputation, but through early experience in his own career.
“When I was on the law teaching market, all those years ago, I interviewed and gave a job talk at CUNY Law and I was really impressed with the Law School—the faculty, the culture, the students. And of course, over the years I’ve gotten to know other faculty who teach here, and have met CUNY Law graduates who work in the fields I engage in. And as a clinician, I’ve long known how highly regarded the clinical program is here.”
But CUNY Law has always had an extra edge, he acknowledges.
“As a public interest attorney—that’s how I define myself, in addition to being a law professor—this is the top school in the country for public interest law. I’m of course very proud of the public interest offerings at American, and the strong reputation we also enjoy in that space, but CUNY Law is walking the walk and talking the talk in a way that other schools are not.”
This semester offered Professor Rathod something different: the opportunity to test that understanding from inside the classroom. He taught Immigration, Race, and the Constitution alongside Public Institutions, courses that move across areas of law that are often taught separately at other schools. At CUNY Law, the curriculum is built on the premise that doctrine cannot be understood apart from the histories, institutions, and distributions of power that shape it, and students are introduced early to frameworks that allow them to work across those contexts.
According to Rathod, that foundation was immediately visible in the classroom. “CUNY Law students are more conversant and comfortable with critical discourse generally. At a lot of law schools, students are trained in a very conventional way—black letter law, appellate cases—and it takes time to build the muscle of critical analysis.” With a grin, he went on to make the distinction that not only are CUNY Law students familiar with critical approaches, but that they are already working within them. “Here, students have already been flexing that muscle. So instead of starting from scratch—by outlining the power dynamics and the underlying interests—we can go deeper into critique right away.”
In his seminar, which brings immigration law, constitutional doctrine, and critical race theory into the same frame, Rathod is not treating those areas as parallel lines of inquiry. The course is structured around a more difficult question: what it means to work across them in a moment when the law is both rapidly shifting and deeply constrained:
There are two things I emphasize:
First, historical perspective. Students often don’t fully grasp the cycles—retrenchment, backlash, anti-immigrant sentiment. We’ve seen this before. There’s a lot to learn from past advocacy strategies, even when cases didn’t go our way.
Second, critical theory as a tool. It’s often treated as abstract—deconstructing cases—but I want students to think about how to use it in litigation.
This requires more than simply asserting ‘the law is racist,’ but connecting that to a doctrinal argument that could succeed. And where doctrine is limiting, how to think more expansively about pushing those boundaries.
I don’t want students to leave feeling hopeless. I want them to leave with tools.
A similar approach carried through his Public Institutions course, where students examined the administrative state not only as doctrine but as a set of processes they could enter. When asked what it was like teaching two sections of the course in the current political environment, Professor Rathod gamely replied that though the doctrine is evolving quickly, he is “used to that from teaching immigration law. It’s actually exciting.” He continued, “You focus on the fundamentals that will remain stable, and then you’re explicit about what could change. It forces students to think about what the law should be, not just what it is.”
The class had a lot of discussions about separation of powers, from executive versus Congress to the role of courts. “Students were really engaging with those questions. Not just learning holdings, but thinking, if you were the court, how would you decide this?”
When the class turned to rulemaking, Rathod asked students from his day program and evening program classes to draft and submit comments on an active Department of Justice proposal (you can read them here, and here, respectively). “I shared an actual proposed DOJ rule and had students draft comments. Each section drafted a collective comment, and we submitted them. They’re now live on the regulations.gov website. It shows the law in action. My students were able to participate in the regulatory process—not just learn about it.”
This kind of work reflects a broader model of legal education at CUNY Law, where the relationship between classroom and practice is intentionally close. Students are expected to engage law as it is experienced and contested—through clinics, applied coursework, and direct work with clients and communities. Rathod saw that expectation reinforced in the students themselves, particularly in the Evening Program.
“Their life and work experience really enriches the classroom. I had a student who’s worked at Veterans Affairs for over a decade—he could connect everything we discussed to real developments in his day-to-day work. Another student involved in labor organizing, bringing that perspective into discussions of the National Labor Review Board.”
Thanks to CUNY Law students’ unique experiences and perspectives Rathod shares, “The conversations have been particularly rich.”
Across both courses, he also observed a level of clarity among students about why they were there and what they intended to do with their training. That sense of direction, combined with a level of proximity between students and faculty, creates a different classroom dynamic—one in which students are not only engaging doctrine, but reading it alongside the lived experiences of their peers and professors, and locating themselves within that work. He shared:
There’s a level of connection here between faculty and students that is different. Some students approach you and introduce themselves. Others are more hesitant, but the engagement is there. And as a faculty member of color, teaching in a classroom that is majority students of color—that’s powerful. I haven’t experienced that in the same way elsewhere.
Deliberate and connected to CUNY Law’s mission, that composition shapes not only who is present but how legal questions are approached, how cases are read, and how discussions unfold. For Rathod, the connections are part of the work and rewards of teaching, creating space for students to develop confidence and community as they move through the program.
The substance of those discussions is shaped by the moment students are entering. In his immigration course, Rathod emphasized the importance of understanding both historical patterns and current conditions. “There’s a lot of lessons to be drawn from similar moments of retrenchment… we’ve been around this block many times.” At the same time, he is attentive to what students take with them. “I don’t want students to leave the seminar with a sense of hopelessness and helplessness,” he said. Instead, he pushes them to think about strategy. “How do we dismantle this obstacle in the law?… and here’s how we can do it.”
That orientation aligns with a broader institutional focus on preparing students not only to understand systems, but to work within and against them. It is reflected in the school’s clinical programs, faculty scholarship, and the paths graduates take across public defender offices, advocacy organizations, and policy roles.
By the end of the semester, Rathod’s assessment was grounded in that experience. “Now, whenever I see a resume from a graduate of CUNY law, I’m going to look at it even more favorably. I understand what it means.” In addition to the connections he has made with his students, he has acquired a newfound and deeper appreciation of the training, the expectations, and the environment that shape CUNY Law graduates.
It also informed how he sees the school beyond the classroom. “It’s a really unique school. I want to tell public interest lawyers and advocates I know looking for community or connection in New York…just check out what is happening at CUNY Law!” he said, pointing to the range of programming, events, conversations, and work happening across the institution where people could get involved. For practitioners and advocates in New York, that observation reads less as an aside than as an invitation—to engage with a law school that is actively producing work and dialogue that extends beyond its walls and are done in collaboration and connection with community.
For Rathod, the semester marked a shift from knowing CUNY Law by reputation to experiencing what that reputation is built on—how we deliver on the promise of our academic program, the ways students are trained to move between analysis and practice, and a community where that work is shared across classrooms, clinics, and the broader life of the law school.