Professor Marie Mark accepts her award
CUNY School of Law Professor Marie Mark, of the Immigrant & Non-Citizen Rights Clinic (INRC), was honored by Neighborhood Defender Service (NDS) at their event Defending Justice and Protecting Immigrant Families on March 17 for her leadership in immigrant justice advocacy, particularly at the intersection of the criminal and immigration systems. The event included the evening’s honors, a panel presentation, and a special reception.
This recognition of Professor Mark reflects years of work shaping the “crim-imm” field in New York through partnerships with organizations including the Immigrant Defense Project and Make the Road New York, where Mark helped build legal strategies and shared infrastructure across organizations. In its invitation, NDS described her as “a guiding light to the New York advocacy community,” pointing to both her legal leadership and her deep commitment to collaboration.
That collaborative model defines both the work and the training students engage in CUNY Law.
“This isn’t about transactional networking,” Mark said. “CUNY Law is a force within advocacy communities across the country, but in particular in New York City. And access to that community is because CUNY Law sees itself and its graduates and its students as a force for good in the city—and that we are better as a group than we are individually.”
Through the INRC, students are embedded in that network, working alongside organizers, defenders, and advocates navigating the overlapping pressures of immigration enforcement and the criminal legal system. Many graduates go on to work in these same spaces, continuing the relationships and strategies developed during their time in the clinic.
For Mark, those relationships are not secondary to the work but what sustains it.
“It’s almost as if we’ve been saving capital away in this bank of relationship building for so long,” she said. “And now, this is when we need it. This is when it’s coming to fruition and we see how resilience is actually made… through institutions like CUNY Law that nurture and cultivate that kind of outlook.”
Mark did not set out to become a law professor, but her experience teaching in the clinic, particularly with Evening Program students, shifted that trajectory.
“CUNY Law is really unique and energizing in a way that motivated me to want to be here more,” she said. “The students are great. They have their own minds about what they are trying to do. It is much more like working with colleagues and trying to understand, ‘what can I bring to you that will help you in this journey that you’re on?’”
That ethos carries directly into how students learn and practice law in the clinic.
“Being embedded in a community of advocates who understand the reasons for this work, value this work, understand when it’s hard and can support people in those moments—that is the thing,” she said.
For Mark, legal education is inseparable from responsibility. A law degree is not simply a credential; it is a form of access—to people, to trust, and to the possibility of meaningful intervention in someone’s life.
“This legal knowledge, from my degree, is the thing that gives me access to all of these wonderful client relationships,” she said. “Being able to help people in this way that really matters is an extreme privilege.”
Mark’s recognition by NDS reflects both her individual contributions and the broader ecosystem she continues to build, one that CUNY Law students enter as participants long before graduation. Her work offers a clear example of how legal education, clinical training, and movement lawyering operate together in practice.
Professor Marie Mark accepts her award