Alumni Teaching Law: Create Enduring Connections Beyond the Classroom

By Karen Brooks

Tensions mounted outside the U.S. Supreme Court well before dawn on Nov. 12, 2019. Activists gathered in droves to show support for the hundreds of thousands of immigrants protected from deportation by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program—the fate of which remains in limbo following the arguments presented to the justices that day.

Several of Rose Cuison-Villazor’s students were among the crowd. They awoke at 3 a.m. to bus to Washington from Rutgers Law School, where Cuison-Villazor ’00 is vice dean, professor of law, and Chancellor’s Social Justice Scholar. The students’ drive to join the demonstration reminded Cuison-Villazor why she got into teaching.

“My job is to think broadly about what skills are essential to the practice of law and to help develop those skills in my students,” she says. “Analytical skills might be the bread and butter, but it’s crucial that lawyers also have empathy, and it’s gratifying to see my students fighting so actively for others’ rights.”

Throughout law school, students have upwards of 20 professors, but only a handful will be the type of educators whose influence extends far beyond graduation. American University Washington College of Law alumni working in higher education strive to be the professors whose impact endures. Here’s how a few of them do it.

Diversity is Powerful

Currently in her second year at Rutgers, Cuison-Villazor teaches Immigration and Citizenship Law, Property Law, Equal Protection Law, and Critical Race Theory and founded the school’s Center for Immigration Law, Policy, and Justice. An immigrant herself, she moved from the Philippines to the Northern Mariana Islands—a U.S. territory in the Pacific—when she was 10 and to Texas after high school.

Her personal experiences shaped her passion for immigration law, but she never envisioned herself as an educator until becoming a research assistant for Leti Volpp, then an AUWCL professor.

“I saw Professor Volpp—a woman, an Asian American, and a respected teacher—and a light bulb went off that I could do what she was doing. Diversity is still lacking in legal academia, and without Professor Volpp’s mentorship, I would not have believed I could have this job,” she remembers.

Cuison-Villazor realizes that tenured academic positions are out of reach for many legal scholars and takes her role as a minority professor seriously, aiming to inspire her students the way Volpp inspired her—regardless of their backgrounds.

“Immigration law has never been easy, but it was not until this administration implemented policies like ‘Zero Tolerance,’ the Muslim ban, family separation, punishments for sanctuary cities, and repealing DACA that it became as exhausting as it is today,” she says. “Students, especially students of color and other diverse students, need to see faculty who look like them to realize they can make a difference. I show them that they all have the power to effect change at the state, local, and federal level, no matter what they look like or where they come from.”

Healthy Competition

Both faculty members at South Texas College of Law Houston, married couple Scott Rempell ’06 and Debra Berman ’07—who met as AUWCL students—share similar philosophies while holding very different positions. Rempell, a tenured professor, teaches Immigration Law, Asylum and Refugee Law, and Legal Research and Writing. Berman, an assistant clinical professor, is director of the Frank Evans Center for Conflict Resolution and heads the college’s alternate dispute resolution competition program, overseeing student teams that compete nationally and internationally.

“Competitions force student to take what they’ve learned in the classroom and apply the communication and negotiation skills that are essential to real-world practice, going up against strangers rather than classmates,” says Berman, who created her own energy law negotiation competition six years ago. She sees expanding ADR competition programs as her most significant contribution to legal education; in fact, she created the ADR
Honor Society at AUWCL in 2004, and today its participants compete all over the world.

Berman seeks to “modernize” practical skills education by taking advantage of technology. She has created an interschool practicum through which students negotiate against others across the country using email, phone, and videoconferencing over a month-long period.

“For so long, negotiation simulations have been practiced among classmates and friends in an artificial one-hour timeframe. I get students out of their comfort zones by making them use technology to negotiate with people out of state for a truer-to-life experience,” she says.

As a classroom-based professor, Rempell finds that many students are their own fiercest competitors. One of his most gratifying teaching moments involved a student who failed his writing class and had to retake it. Rempell pushed that individual to take ownership of their learning experience, and the second time around, the student got an A-plus on the final paper.

“I do not give out A-pluses,” Rempell says, “but this student earned it. This shows that regardless of what level someone is at, they can be reached—not just to get by, but to truly flourish.” He rejects the notion that law professors must remain stern and stoic 100 percent of the time and tries to give students as much of his attention as they need.

“You don’t go through formal training to become a law professor, so I’ve spent a lot of time educating myself about what’s at the root of being a good teacher. It’s about cognitive science and psychology,” he says. “I make my students work hard, but I don’t have to act like a jerk in order to be effective.”

Bursting Bubbles

Francisco Rivera Juaristi ’03, associate clinical professor and founding director of the International Human Rights Clinic at the Santa Clara University School of Law, knows the key to success in the field of law: flexibility. In addition to overseeing clinics at the school, Rivera Juaristi runs summer abroad programs in Geneva, Switzerland, and in Costa Rica—where he previously worked at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, an institution he first visited as the student of former AUWCL Dean Claudio Grossman. International travel profoundly changes lives and perspectives, he says.

“I teach at a private law school in an environment that is kind of like a big, safe bubble,” he says. “I want to burst that bubble and broaden students’ understanding of how the world works and how the law operates differently in different places—even if they are not interested in pursuing an international or a human rights career.”

Last October, Rivera Juaristi took students to a small island off the coast of Puerto Rico, where they arranged to meet with community members about human rights-related issues. Back in California, they had practiced for these conversations around a conference room table; in reality, the meeting took place on a community basketball court full of children, with music
blaring and chickens, dogs, horses, and cows clamoring in the background. Experiential learning opportunities like this will only continue to expand, Rivera Juaristi predicts, because they give students the tools they need to be practice-ready.

“My students and I have interviewed indigenous Mayans in Belize while traveling in a wooden canoe on a river, talking about how water contamination affects their livelihood,” he says. “They tell me these experiences are the highlight of their legal education, not just because travel is exciting, but because they learn how to adapt to any situation and are prepared to succeed—whether they’re on Capitol Hill in Washington or on a pineapple plantation in Costa Rica.”

Questioning Everything

Jennifer Gundlach ’96 thinks lawyers should ask as many questions as they answer. The Emily and Stephen Mendel Distinguished Professor of Law and Clinical Professor at Hofstra Law, Gundlach runs the school’s Pro Bono Scholars Program—a New York State initiative that allows third-year law students to take the February bar exam and then spend 12 weeks of their final semester providing pro bono legal services for clients who cannot afford to pay for representation. Last year, she also launched a program through which students provide limited-scope legal services to people who do not have representation in federal court.

When guiding students, Gundlach draws from lessons she learned from Professor Ann Shalleck, faculty director of AUWCL’s Women and the Law Program, who introduced her to the concept of client-centered lawyering.

“Ann taught me to constantly examine the assumptions I brought into my representation of clients and to question the flash judgments lawyers can fall prey to making,” Gundlach says. She recalls a client who was the victim of domestic violence failing to show up for a meeting, frustrating students and leading them to assume she was not invested in her case. “Ann sat us down and got us to think about the thousands of reasons our client might not have shown. Maybe she didn’t have bus fare. Maybe her child was sick. Maybe she wasn’t happy with our team. This opened my eyes in a big way.”

These reality checks motivated Gundlach to become an educator so that she, too, could push aspiring lawyers to put themselves in clients’ shoes. She began her teaching career at AUWCL shortly after graduating, first as an adjunct professor and then as practitioner-in-residence in the Civil Practice Clinic. Today, at Hofstra, she teaches students how to do their work—and do it effectively—while also caring about the experiences of the people they represent.

“Some lawyers interrogate people,” she says, “but we also need to interrogate our own way of thinking.”

Practice Makes Passion

Just nine years out of law school, Reena Parikh ’11 is headed to Boston College Law School this fall to serve as an assistant clinical professor and build a civil rights clinic from scratch. Currently the Robert M. Cover Clinical Teaching Fellow in the Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic at Yale Law School, Parikh emphasizes the importance not just of exposure to diverse individuals, but also to diverse kinds of lawyering. She and her colleagues in the clinic assign each of their students one litigation matter and one community group advocacy matter during their first semester.

“Traditionally, clinics have taught individual client representation, but lawyers can also play a supportive role behind a community organizing effort. It’s important for students to know how to work with organizational clients, too,” she says.

The value of clinical education is unparalleled, Parikh explains, because representing “real, live clients” results in deeper intellectual engagement and understanding of both laws and the populations they affect. When her students visit immigrant detention facilities for the first time, for example, she watches their momentum take off, much like hers did when she worked
in AUWCL’s Immigrant Justice Clinic as a student—which she describes as her most impactful educational experience. Once, she and her clinic partner secured a client’s release from immigration detention after many months. It’s a moment she will never forget.

“It was humbling to see the gravity of detention and then to help this person gain his freedom. Because of that experience, I will always work with my students to represent clients whose civil rights are being violated,” Parikh says. “I learned firsthand that clinical education shapes minds and hearts, and I want to help make that happen for my students.”