17 Feb 2012
Michael Wishnie Named William O. Douglas Clinical Professor of Law at Yale
"Michael Wishnie ’93, a
clinical professor of law at Yale Law School and director of the Jerome
N. Frank Legal Services Organization (LSO), has been named the William
O. Douglas Clinical Professor of Law at Yale Law School.
Professor Wishnie joined Yale Law School in 2006 and assumed
directorship of LSO in February 2011, following the announcement of the
departure of longtime director Bob Solomon. He previously taught for
eight years at New York University School of Law. His teaching,
scholarship, and law practice have focused on immigration, labor and
employment, habeas corpus, civil rights, and veterans law. He currently
teaches the Worker & Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic, Veterans
Legal Services Clinic, Advanced 9-11 Clinic, and Federal Courts:
Selected Topics.
“Throughout the country, Mike Wishnie is regarded as a pathbreaking
clinical professor,” said Dean Robert Post ’77. “Mike offers
cutting-edge reconceptualizations of the lawyer’s role. He teaches our
students how to link structural legal change to community empowerment.”
For many years, Wishnie and his students have represented a wide range
of community groups, churches, labor unions, and individuals in
litigation and other forms of advocacy to defend and advance the rights
of working people, immigrants, and in his newest clinic, veterans. This
work has led to a variety of notable cases in recent years, including
the representation in Immigration Court and in federal civil rights
litigation of the so-called “Danbury 11,” a group of day laborers who
challenged the legality of their arrest in an undercover sting operation
carried out by local Danbury police officers in 2006; representation in
Immigration Court and civil rights litigation of 30 persons arrested by
ICE agents in a series of home raids in New Haven in June 2007, 48
hours after the New Haven Board of Aldermen had overwhelming approved
the Mayor’s proposal to establish an optional municipal ID card program,
open to all city residents regardless of immigration status;
representation of a disabled Navy veteran demanding that the VA
recognize her same-sex marriage and provide spousal disability benefits;
representation of residents, shop-keepers, and a church challenging
anti-Latino profiling and police violence in East Haven, Connecticut;
and representation of Vietnam Veterans of America in a suit alleging the
Pentagon wrongfully discharged 26,000 service members since 2001 on the
basis of personality disorder rather than post-traumatic stress
disorder or other medical conditions so as to avoid having to pay
medical and disability benefits to these veterans.
Apart from litigation, in recent years Wishnie and his students have
represented an interfaith coalition in its successful effort to secure
state legislation providing in-state tuition to Connecticut residents
regardless of immigration status; Hartford community groups in
persuading the city’s Common Council to update its living wage ordinance
and to enact the nation’s strongest municipal law governing
confidentiality of immigration status; other community organizations in
convincing New Haven to adopt a policy of non-enforcement of civil
immigration laws and to offer the nation’s first optional municipal ID
card to all residents regardless of immigration status; persuading
Immigration and Customs Enforcement to adopt a policy prohibiting the
deportation of immigrants involved in pending civil rights lawsuits and
to eliminate its prior policy of imposing annual arrest quotas on its
sub-offices; and in persuading the U.S. Department of Justice Civil
Rights Division to launch a major investigation that resulted in the
release last month of detailed findings that the East Haven Police
Department has engaged in a pattern of systematic discrimination against
Latinos.
Professor Wishnie received his B.A. from Yale University in 1987 and his J.D. from Yale Law School in 1993.
The William O. Douglas Clinical Professorship of Law was established in
1989 by a gift from Mrs. Gordon B. Tweedy and her daughters in memory of
Gordon Bradford Tweedy ’32, on the occasion of the anniversaries of his
graduation from Yale College and Yale Law School, and in honor of the
Honorable William O. Douglas, Sterling Professor of Law at Yale Law
School and Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1939–75." - Yale, Jan. 10, 2012.