Award honors Fernandez for advancing legal skills pedagogy and student success
CUNY School of Law Associate Professor Jennifer Fernandez has been awarded the 2024 Association of Academic Support Educators (AASE) Excellence Award for Outstanding Debut in Academic Support, a national honor recognizing early-career law professors whose work is reshaping how law students are taught and supported.
Professor Fernandez’s recognition comes at a moment of heightened scrutiny and shifting expectations in legal education. With new ABA standards foregrounding bias, racism, and professional identity, and the NextGen Bar Exam set to reshape assessment, law schools are being asked to show not just what they teach, but how and why. While many institutions are reexamining their approaches in response, CUNY Law has built its academic program around these commitments since its founding in 1983.
Since joining the faculty in 2022, Professor Fernandez has taught in the Summer Law Institute and Orientation, developed skills courses aligned with 1L content, served as a bar mentor, and presented nationally on inclusive pedagogy and co-teaching. Her work reflects a commitment not only to academic success, but to a more equitable vision of legal education.
Her contributions reflect a commitment not only to academic success, but to a more equitable vision of legal education.
That vision is at the heart of her recent article, “The Time is Now: ABA Standard 303(c) as the Impetus for a Truly Inclusive 1L Classroom,” published in the Washington University Journal of Law & Policy. In it, Fernandez argues that the ABA’s new Curriculum Standard 303(c) presents a long-overdue opportunity to reform exclusionary teaching practices, especially in the first year, when disparities in access and support often take hold. Her article presents a roadmap for making the law school classroom more inclusive in alignment with the spirit of the standard.
“The American Bar Association’s new Standard is our chance to finally take the steps scholars have advocated for many years and make the law school experience, especially the 1L curriculum, more inclusive,” she writes. “Anything otherwise would be strongly antithetical to the underlying goals of the new standard.”
Fernandez connects 303(c) with broader shifts in the field, including Standard 303(b) on professional identity and the coming bar exam overhaul, and calls for classrooms that are not only doctrinally rigorous, but structurally inclusive and pedagogically transparent.
Her scholarship and national recognition affirm what CUNY Law has long understood: the classroom is not a neutral space. Who is seen, what is named, and how learning is scaffolded shape who becomes a lawyer and how justice is practiced.