Laila Hlass Elected to Clinical Legal Education Association Board of Directors
Director of the Immigrants Rights’ Clinic will serve on the organization’s board in 2016.
Laila Hlass, clinical associate professor and director of Boston University School of Law’s Immigrants Rights’ Clinic, has been elected to the board of directors of the Clinical Legal Education Association (CLEA).
According to its mission statement, CLEA was created to “advocate for clinical legal education as fundamental to the education of lawyers.” The group strives to “foster excellent teaching and scholarship by clinical educators; integrate clinical teaching and extend its methods into the legal education program of every law school; reform legal education so as to prepare law students for excellent and reflective law practice; advance regulation of legal education that insures the continued vitality of clinical education in law schools; and pursue and promote justice and diversity as core values of the legal profession.”
“CLEA has been an essential resource for me as a junior clinician,” Hlass says, “In the years before I had the support to attend the national clinical conference, the new clinician’s handbook was a critical resource for me to understand various clinical models and to improve my teaching. As a board member, I look forward to contributing to these resources and hope to serve the clinical community by continuing to fight for the freedom of clinics to advocate for vulnerable and politically unpopular clients and taking part in efforts to support new clinicians.”
Professor Laila Hlass joined BU Law’s faculty in July 2014, directing the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic. Previously, she was a clinical teaching fellow with the Center for Applied Legal Studies, an asylum clinic, at Georgetown University Law Center. In this role, she participated in all aspects of managing the clinic—through case selection, curriculum design, and budgeting—and specifically taught and supervised students in the semester-long asylum clinic. Prior to Georgetown, Professor Hlass was a staff attorney in the Immigration Clinic at Loyola University New Orleans, College of Law, where she advocated for particularly vulnerable immigrants in the deep south, including survivors of violence, detainees, and children. While at Loyola, she also served as the interim director of the Office of Law Skills and Experiential Learning and as an adjunct professor, teaching a seminar in refugee and asylum law.
