As we begin the fall 2020 semester at CUNY Law, we’d like to warmly welcome new faculty, staff, and clinics who are joining our community this fall in unparalleled times.
Faculty and Staff
Professor Gregory Louis
Professor Gregory Louis is teaching contracts, business associations, and other business law courses from the economic rights/anti-racist perspective. This perspective drove his work as co-founder and general counsel of Communities Resist, a civil legal services organization serving low-income households and community-based organizations in Brooklyn and Queens under a community lawyering and organizing model. Read more about his work and advocacy in this feature, and read his latest piece in the LPE Blog. Follow Gregory on Twitter @GregoryELouis1
Professor Dominique Day
Professor Dominique Day is the vice chair of the U.N. Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent, a fact-finding expert body that reports to the U.N. Human Rights Council. She is a human rights attorney and the director of DAYLIGHT | Rule of Law • Access to Justice • Advocacy, which offers a multi-sector approach to intersectional racial justice work.
Her teaching, litigation, policy, research, and capacity-building focus heavily on racial justice and human rights advocacy. Dominique’s work on behalf of individuals and communities within the Black diaspora includes rule of law and access to justice issues internationally in post-conflict and transitional States. She is teaching Race and the Law this fall. You can follow Doninique’s work and advocacy on Twitter @dominiqus
Professor Ana Avendaño
Professor Ana Avendaño is a lifelong worker advocate, having held senior positions in the labor movement, playing major roles in changing the labor movement’s position on immigration, and broadening the AFL-CIO’s vision to include worker centers and other non-traditional worker organizations.
Zamir Ben-Dan
Zamir Ben-Dan is a staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society. He spent four years in the Bronx criminal trial office and is now at the Community Justice Unit in Brooklyn. His scholarship focuses on issues at the intersection of criminal law, anti-Black racism, and history. He also teaches as an adjunct in the Black and Latino Studies Department at Baruch College. He is teaching Lawyering Seminar B this semester.
His practice and teaching are infused with a deep appreciation for the centrality of working from a deep understanding of historical context and a full exploration of contemporary context, believing that treating people as if they live in a vacuum “does humanity a grave disservice.”
Zamir is a representative for the Black Attorneys of Legal Aid caucus (BALA), an amalgamation of Black public interest lawyers at Legal Aid. You can find them on Instagram as bala_nyc, Twitter @BALA_NYC, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
Amanda Wright, Director of Student Affairs
Amanda Wright, our new Director of Student affairs, earned her Juris Doctor from Michigan State University where she graduated Summa Cum Laude and studied a curriculum focused on practice and advocacy through the integration of law and social work, and conflict resolution.
Amanda’s diverse law school curriculum and her experience working in economically disadvantaged cities and rural areas in Michigan led her to pursue her Masters of Social Work at Boston College where she fully developed her interest in the law’s role in social movements.
Amanda has eight years of student affairs experience, including experience with Title IX, compliance, student conduct, assessment, academic integrity, and student care. Currently, Amanda is earning her LLM in Higher Education Law and Compliance at Cumberland School of Law.
Clinics
CLEAR
The Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility (CLEAR) Clinic supports Muslim and all other communities and movements in the New York City area and beyond that are targeted by local, state, or federal government agencies under the guise of national security and counterterrorism. CLEAR provides three primary services free of charge: legal representation and consultation; know-your-rights workshops; and support for community organizing and social movements. CLEAR is the only organization that systematically provides this range of support and services free of charge.
CLEAR’s work is defined by their relationships with communities and movements whose members wish to abolish or transform the law enforcement policies and practices that affect them. CLEAR’s community-oriented and movement-building approach combines free legal representation with other services directed at satisfying the fuller range of community and movement concerns.
CLEAR was founded as a project in 2009, and now it becomes a full clinic.
Workers’ Rights Clinic
This fall, Professors Chaumtoli Huq and Stephen Loffredo are piloting a Workers’ Rights Clinic, which aims to protect and expand workers’ rights through collaborations with community- based organizations and in partnership with governmental agencies that share a commitment to workers’ rights.
Professor Chaumtoli Huq notes: “CUNY Law has always had a labor docket, and it was most recently housed in our Community Economic Development Clinic, but a stand-alone clinic will allow us to devote much-needed attention on the impact of COVID on low-wage workers. The clinic came about due to the principled and persistent advocacy of our students, some now alums, and the current cohort of students. Many of our alums are working on the front lines of worker justice. We have invited them to return to CUNY to play a role in the clinic as guest speakers, advisors, and potential co-counsel on cases. We envision the clinic to be a dynamic hub for law students, alums, organizers, and movement lawyers to breaking down boundaries between clinic and community.”
Professor Huq joined CUNY Law as a professor after two decades of movement lawyering on behalf of workers in the U.S. and in South Asia because she wanted to support and train the next generation of lawyers for our labor movement and other social movements. COVID-19 has proven that workers across the country and globe will need committed legal advocates.
Stephen Loffredo affirms: “The creation of the Workers’ Rights Clinic is very much a testament to the persistence, passion, and organizing skills of generations of CUNY Law students and their respectful refusal to take no for an answer.”
Health and Environmental Justice Practice Clinic
The Health and Environmental Justice Practice Clinic provides students the opportunity to advocate for historically marginalized communities and individuals and to support governmental efforts for environmental and health justice. The core of the clinic’s work is student advocacy for environmental and health equity. Students work on either health access or environmental justice issues. Students are placed in externships with community and government partners, where they work to dismantle legal barriers that negatively impact the health and well–being of vulnerable communities and individuals.
Health-focused students immerse themselves in the right to adequate healthcare, access to insurance and government-supported health programs, immigrant access to health services, challenging discrimination, and the ways in which government authorities can promote the public health and health equity. Environment-focused students immerse themselves in the right to a safe, healthy, clean, and sustainable environment. This new collaboration from Professors Janet Calvo and Rebecca Bratspies will give students deeper and broader opportunities at the intersection of health and environmental justice.