Ilana Hurwitz

Biography

Ms. Hurwitz has taught Trusts & Estates as visiting faculty at Boston University School of Law since 1997. She also taught at Boston College Law School for fifteen years. In addition to Trusts & Estates, Ms. Hurwitz has taught Alternative Dispute Resolution, Negotiation, Advanced Negotiation, and a course in lawyering skills and professional responsibility. Ms. Hurwitz supervised students in Harvard Law School’s Advocates for Human Rights Program and worked for several years in a Boston law firm focusing on family law and probate litigation. She clerked for Rya W. Zobel of the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts. Ms. Hurwitz co-authored Divorce Fundamentals: Law and Finances (1996); and The ‘Genius Factor’ and Equitable Distribution of Property at Divorce, 38 Boston Bar Journal 10 (1994). She authored Collaborative Reproduction: Finding the Child in the Maze of Legal Motherhood, 33 Connecticut Law Review 127 (2000).

Long interested in international human rights, Ms. Hurwitz, a South African native, began her legal career during the apartheid era working for South Africa’s largest independent public interest law facility, the Legal Resources Centre in Johannesburg. She has been involved in refugee issues for almost 30 years, having represented asylum seekers, served for 12 years as a director of the Political Asylum/Immigration Representation Project, providing pro bono legal services for asylum seekers and immigrants unjustly detained, and having coached refugees on career development at Boston Center for Refugee Health and Human Rights. For the past three years, Ms. Hurwitz has advised Integrity Initiatives International, a NGO combating grand corruption across the globe with the ultimate goal of establishing an International Anti-Corruption Court. She serves on the board of directors of South Africa Partners, building mutually beneficial partnerships between the U.S. and South Africa in areas of health and education.

Ms. Hurwitz earned Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Laws cum laude at University of the Witwatersrand and, as a Fulbright Scholar, Master of Laws at Harvard Law School. As a prerequisite for the Massachusetts bar examination, she later earned a Juris Doctor degree cum laude at Suffolk Law School.