It is with great excitement and pleasure that CUNY Law announces the hiring of seven new tenured and tenure-track faculty members. New names and faces include Natalie Chin and Jason Parkin; you may recognize the names of Eduardo Capulong and Julia Hernandez, two alumni new to our faculty ranks, as well as the familiar Tarek Ismail, Lynn Lu, and Talia Peleg, who have been valuable members of our community for some time now, teaching our students, working in our clinics, and helping launch the Court Square Law Project.
We are proud to have them with us and look forward to their unique and varied contributions to our community, our clinics, and their fields of scholarship and advocacy.
Eduardo Capulong ’91 joins our faculty as a Professor of Law and will direct CUNY Law’s Lawyering Program. Fluent in Tagalog and conversant in Spanish, he rejoins us after nearly two decades out West, broken up by a stint at NYU School of Law and a year in Granada, Spain as a visiting scholar. Most recently, he worked at the University of Montana Alexander Blewett III School of Law in various capacities, including as a Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Clinical and Experiential Education, as well as teaching courses in Lawyering, Alternative Dispute Resolution, Race, Racism, and American Law, and Law and Social Justice. He also served as a lawyering professor and lecturer at New York University and as the Director of the Public Interest, Public Policy and Externship Programs at Stanford Law School. While there, he taught Public Interest Lawyering and Community Organizing.
Prior to teaching, Capulong practiced civil rights, poverty, immigration, and labor law. He has worked as a litigator, policy analyst, and community organizer for non-profits, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, the Northern California Coalition for Immigrant Rights, Community Service Society, Center for Constitutional Rights, Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence, and Chinese Staff and Workers’ Association.
Capulong earned his B.A. in Political Science and Journalism at New York University and his J.D. at CUNY Law, where he was a Patricia Roberts Harris and Davis-Putter Fellow.
Natalie M. Chin joins CUNY Law after professorships at Brooklyn Law School and the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. At Brooklyn Law School, Chin was Faculty Director of the Disability and Civil Rights Clinic, the first of its kind to focus on providing legal services exclusively to adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities and their families in the country. She served as a Clinical Teaching Fellow in the Guardianship Clinic at Cardozo.
The Law School is thrilled to have her expertise to help evolve the recently re-named Disability & Aging Justice Clinic where she will be teaching.
Chin’s scholarship pertains to discrimination amongst the aging population and LGBT+ community, having written multiple scholarly articles on these subjects. She serves on the advisory committee of the New York City Anti-Violence Project and is Co-Chair of the Board of FIERCE, a grassroots organization that develops leadership skills among queer young people of color.
Prior to entering law, Chin was a journalist reporting on urban affairs in California and Johannesburg, South Africa. As a law student, she interned at the U.S. Agency for International Development to monitor USAID economic assistance programs in Sub-Saharan Africa, and at the Legal Aid Society.
Chin trains and competes in triathlons, plays piano, and likes to travel the world. She graduated from Boston University with a B.S. in Journalism and later earned her J.D. from the George Washington University School of Law.
Julia Hernandez ’12 joins our faculty as an Assistant Professor, teaching Law and Family Relations as well as teaching in the Immigrant and Non-Citizen Rights Clinic. She returned to CUNY Law as an adjunct professor last year, co-teaching the Disability & Aging Justice Clinic (formerly Elder Law Clinic) and supervising cases involving guardianships of disabled adults, minor children, and Special Immigrant Juvenile Status cases. Prior to that, she was an Adjunct Professor of Legal Practice at Seton Hall Law School, where her work focused on introducing law students to persuasion and advocacy.
Before teaching, she was part of the Law School’s Community Legal Resource Network, a program that places alumni in local communities through funding from Councilmembers’ offices and community organizations, to expand access to legal resources and representation. Hernandez worked for the Catholic Migration Services’ Removal Defense Project and then as a Staff Attorney and Senior Staff Attorney at Brooklyn Defender Services for a total of four years.
Hernandez earned her B.A. from the State University of New York at New Paltz with a litany of academic awards and graduated from CUNY School of Law, having received the Puerto Rican Bar Association Award and Kyle D. Jewell Fellowship in 2010, as well as the Charles H. Revson Public Interest Fellowship in 2011.
Tarek Z. Ismail is a new member of the Law School’s Family Law Practice Clinic, but has been part of the CUNY Law community since 2016, when he joined us as Senior Staff Attorney for the Law School’s Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility (CLEAR) Project. At CLEAR, Ismail focused on addressing the legal needs of Muslim, Arab, South Asian, and other communities in the New York City area that are targeted and surveilled by federal and city government agencies.
Prior to joining CLEAR, Ismail served as a Staff Attorney in Brooklyn Defender Services’ Family Defense Practice and was the Counterterrorism & Human Rights Fellow at Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Institute. Ismail’s scholarship focuses on human rights abuses, particularly in the United States, and he was lead author on a report co-published with Human Rights Watch, Illusion of Justice: Human Rights Abuses in US Terrorism Prosecutions.
Ismail holds a J.D. from Columbia Law School, where he was a Notes & Submissions Editor for the Human Rights Law Review, and earned his B.A. in Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia.
Lynn D. Lu begins this academic year as an Associate Professor of Law and continues to co-direct the Law School’s Economic Justice Project. Previously, Lu was a managing and supervising attorney at CUNY Law’s Court Square Law Project, one of the first law school incubators in the country. Most recently, Lu has been an Instructor at the Law School, where her teaching focused on developing professional identity and cross-cultural competency.
Prior to coming to CUNY Law, Lu was the Associate Director of NYU School of Law’s Lawyering Program, where she taught for three years. Before teaching, she was a staff attorney at the National Center for Law and Economic Justice and a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law.
Before earning her law degree, Lu co-managed a nonprofit book publishing collective devoted to supporting political education, grassroots activism, and alternative media. She graduated from Harvard College with a B.A. in Women’s Studies, and earned her M.A. in English Literature and Critical Theory from Sussex University and her J.D. from NYU School of Law.
Jason Parkin joins our faculty as a Professor of Law and co-director of the Economic Justice Project. Before coming to the Law School he taught at Pace Law School, as well as at Columbia Law School and Yale Law School, as a Visiting Clinical Professor. His work has centered around neighborhood and community justice, including immigrant rights, labor advocacy, and representing grassroots and community organizations.
Before teaching law, Parkin worked and interned for many advocacy entities, including the New York Legal Assistance Group’s Special Litigation Unit to enforce the rights of public benefits recipients, the National Employment Law Project, the National Center for Law & Economic Justice, and South Brooklyn Legal Services. Parkin also assisted with creating, implementing, and evaluating the School District of Philadelphia’s policies around charter schools and school-choice legislation.
Parkin graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a B.A. in History and earned his J.D. from Columbia Law School, where he was awarded the Valentin J.T. Wertheimer Prize in Labor Law and multiple human rights and public interest fellowships.
Talia Peleg ’10 joins CUNY Law’s faculty as an Associate Professor of Law after serving as a Visiting Clinical Law Professor in the Law School’s Immigrant and Non-Citizen Rights Clinic for the past two years. Prior to her return to CUNY Law, Peleg was an adjunct Supervising Attorney with NYU School of Law’s Immigrant Rights and Advanced Immigrant Rights Clinics.
Before teaching full time, Peleg worked for the Brooklyn Defender Services Immigration Practice’s New York Immigrant Family Unity Project, where she was a team leader and supervising attorney. In 2013 she was one of four attorneys in New York City to help implement and shape NYIFUP – a groundbreaking, first-in-the-nation universal representation program for detained immigrants. Over nearly seven years at BDS, she represented hundreds of non-citizens, most of whom had current or prior interactions with the criminal legal system. Prior to attending CUNY Law, she was a member of the Courtroom Advocates Project team at Sanctuary for Families, where she advocated for immigrant domestic violence survivors in Family Court.
Talia earned her B.A. in Women’s Studies from Vassar College and her J.D. from CUNY School of Law, where she was part of INRC, Law Review, Moot Court, as well as President of the CUNY Contemplative Urban Law Program.