2020 Metcalf Cup and Prize Recipient: Sarah Sherman-Stokes

Sarah Sherman-Stokes teaches students how to be immigration lawyers by being immigration lawyers. They represent immigrants in court under her supervision. They visit detained clients in jail. And when there is an immigration crisis, they jump in. In 2018, when migrant children were being forcibly separated from their parents at the US-Mexico border, Sherman-Stokes took her students to Arizona to advise families of their rights. Her students went to Tijuana to help refugees who were traveling in a caravan from Central America and being demonized by the Trump administration.

“It’s important for students to know that lawyers have to show up when there is something we don’t agree with,” says Sherman-Stokes, a BU School of Law lecturer and clinical instructor and associate director of LAW’s Immigrants’ Rights & Human Trafficking Program. “We should be there and we should get in the way and we should bear witness to what’s happening and try to do good. A law degree is a very powerful tool. The goal is to use that tool to do good.

“My pedagogy,” she says, “aims to tackle social injustice at the macro level.”

Sherman-Stokes’ teaching—and action—has helped win national recognition for BU’s immigration law program. It is the kind of teaching that students say transforms their lives, inspiring many of them to be public-interest lawyers intent on making a difference.

“Sarah shows us that it’s always important to see clients as full people,” says Silvia Mavares (LAW’21). “It’s the same way she treats students. She always makes time for us to be human. I’ve never been in another law school class that emphasizes the humanity of clients the way Sarah does. That’s why she’s so successful and why we love her so much.”

It’s also part of what led the Faculty Teaching Awards Committee judges to award Sherman-Stokes this year’s Metcalf Cup and Prize for Excellence in Teaching, to be presented at BU’s as-yet-unscheduled 147th Commencement. Committee members who observed Sherman-Stokes’ teaching said they were “in awe.” In her letter recommending Sherman-Stokes for the Metcalf, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, dean of LAW, cited her “grace in intellectually challenging and emotionally grueling immigration work.”

”Not only is Sarah an exceptional attorney and an unwavering advocate for immigrants’ rights, she is also a beloved mentor to the students in her clinic,” Onwuachi-Willig says. “I particularly appreciate Sarah’s relentlessly positive attitude and can-do spirit.”

Sherman-Stokes credits Onwuachi-Willig, as well as Julie Dahlstrom, a clinical associate professor of law and director of the Immigrants’ Rights & Human Trafficking Program, and a long list of other colleagues as her own teachers. “I feel like there’s so much to learn,” she says. “Legal education is constantly changing. We’re constantly becoming better at what we’re doing. We’ve come a long way when it comes to cross-cultural humility, anti-racism education, the ways in which we recognize our students’ lived experience, and the ways in which we help to amplify our clients’ voices.”

“Sarah encourages her students not only to become model attorneys, but to become critical thinkers and leaders,” Dahlstrom says. “And the students rise to this challenge. We need more teachers and lawyers like Sarah.”

Student evaluations of Sherman-Stokes routinely include words like “inspiring,” “thoughtful,” and “amazing.” One student wrote that Sherman-Stokes’ “willingness to always give us her all makes us want to be the best students we can.” Mavares and other students marvel at how Sherman-Stokes, who is the single mother of two young sons, manages to be almost always available for them—and not just during regular school hours, but at 1 am and on the weekends, when they’re racing to finish a brief for court and need feedback.

Sherman-Stokes’ scholarship explores the intersections of immigration law and mental health, as well as the interactions between immigration and the criminal justice system. She earned a BA from Bates College, where she majored in Latin America studies, and during study abroad in Central America, began listening to migration stories.

She graduated with a Juris Doctor from Boston College Law School in 2011, then spent two years as an Equal Justice Works Fellow representing immigrant detainees at the Political Asylum/Immigration Representation (PAIR) Project. In 2013 BU invited her to apply for a one-year teaching fellowship at the law school.

“I had guest-lectured in a couple of classes at BC and Roger Williams,” she says. “I loved it. I thought, wow, this could be a dream position.”

That BU fellowship turned into her dream job two years later when she was hired full-time.

From BU Today, May 13, 2020. Read the full story by Sara Rimer.