OF NOTE Immigration Justice Clinic Aids Families IN THE SPRING OF 2016, six law school students, along with Professors Vanessa Merton, Tom McDonnell and Vikki Rogers, and Miguel SanchezRobles from Pace Law’s Immigration Justice Clinic, traveled to Dilley, Texas to volunteer with the CARA Pro Bono Project and provide volunteer representation to women seeking asylum in the United States. Dilley, the site of the largest Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center, holds people awaiting disposition of their immigration or refugee claims. Our students and faculty worked on the ground to assist these women and their families, people who have travelled to the U.S. to escape persecution, torture and other life-threating situations. Over the course of one week, the group handled 170 intakes, prepared 148 women for interviews, and had nearly 150 meetings with their new clients. Due to their extraordinary efforts, more than 90 women and their families were released from detention. The students’ work in Dilley represents some of the best of Pace Law. Their work demonstrates what it truly means to be a lawyer - helping to tell a client’s story, to advocate for their rights and to counsel them through legal procedures and processes. Their efforts will continue to have an extraordinary impact on the hundreds of women and families that they helped. n
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PA C E L AW A L U M N I M A G A Z I N E
Professor David Dorfman ASK PROFESSOR DAVID DORFMAN about the most important case of his career as a practicing attorney and he’ll start by describing a hamburger. “I can still picture him eating it, how juicy it was, how much he enjoyed it,” Professor Dorfman said while sitting in his office on the third floor of Preston. He had bought the hamburger for his client. It was the first thing the man had wanted after he was acquitted of a crime that would have sent him away for the rest of his life; the first thing he wanted after he walked out of Rikers where he had sat for a year and a half awaiting his trial. Professor Dorfman had served as his Legal Aid attorney. “He had been a loser his whole life,” Professor Dorfman explained. “He never expected to be acquitted. But he had turned his life around and, reading through the file, I was convinced he was innocent.” The case illustrates the difference that one person can make when they are an effective lawyer—the biggest lesson that Professor Dorfman tries to impart to his Pace Law students. It reveals what a lawyer can contribute by stepping into another person’s shoes— someone whose life choices may be very different from your own—and caring enough to use your legal training to bring about an outcome that will change their client’s life. “There is nothing like representing somebody just about to fall off the edge into oblivion and you are able to keep that from happening,” he reflected. “You don’t win all the time when doing major defense cases, but a trial like that—how more useful could I be?” It is this passion and commitment that Professor Dorfman works to instill in his students. After almost seven years at Legal Aid, he switched over to teaching when a friend told him about an opening at NYU Law School, a non-tenure track position in their First Year Lawyering program. After two years, he was encouraged by his mentor at NYU, Professor Anthony