Alexandra Carter, a former associate attorney with Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP and a mediator, is an associate clinical professor, teaching the Law School's Mediation Clinic with professor Carol B. Liebman.
Carter, who won the Jane Marks Murphy Prize for clinical advocacy while a student at Columbia Law School, has become a strong advocate of mediation as a valuable tool for many kinds of legal challenges. Through Safe Horizon, a New York-based non-profit that specializes in mediation, Carter has served as a mediator. She has also supervised student mediations in court-related programs at New York City Civil Court and Harlem Small Claims Court.
She has been at Cravath, Swaine & Moore since 2004, where she has served on a team defending against a multi-billion dollar securities class-action lawsuit related to Enron. She has also served as the senior antitrust associate on several multi-billion dollar mergers and worked on cases involving copyright law.
Carter majored in English and minored in Mandarin Chinese at Georgetown University, earning her B.A. in 1997. She spent 1997-98 in Taiwan on a Fulbright Scholarship, where she researched Taiwan's contemporary literature to assess the political tensions at the time between those who wanted the island to assert independence and those who favored reunification with the Republic of China.
She worked as a private equity analyst with Goldman Sachs in New York from 1998 to 2000, then enrolled at Columbia Law School, where she took the mediation clinic, and later worked as a teaching assistant in the clinic under Professor Liebman. Carter also was articles editor for the Journal of Transnational Law.
While at Columbia Law School Carter also won the Lawrence S. Greenbaum Prize for best oral argument in the 2002 Harlan Fiske Stone Moot Court Competition. Carter earned her J.D. in 2003, then clerked for the Hon. Mark L. Wolf, U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts in Boston before joining Cravath, Swaine & Moore.
Professor Brett Dignam joined the Columbia Law School faculty in 2010. She came to Columbia from Yale Law School, where she led the Prison Legal Services, Complex Federal Litigation and Supreme Court Advocacy clinics.
An award-winning teacher, Professor Dignam has supervised students in a broad range of litigation matters and has designed and overseen workshops conducted by students for prisoners at the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut on issues including immigration, sexual assault, and exhaustion under the Prison Litigation Reform Act.
She has participated in major litigation in over 30 federal and state cases in the area of prisoners' rights.
Before entering the legal academy, Professor Dignam served as a law clerk for the Honorable William H. Orrick, U.S. District Court in San Francisco, California, and then developed a prison litigation practice in both federal and state courts.
She also served as an attorney in the Criminal Appeals and Tax Enforcement Policy Section, Tax Division, in the Department of Justice, from 1990-92, where she handled criminal appeals in all federal courts of appeals; the cases involved motor fuel excise tax/organized crime task force, savings and loan task force and sentencing guidelines issues. She also assisted Deputy Assistant Attorney General James Bruton to form the Division Policy on issues ranging from money laundering to RICO.
Dignam has both a criminal and civil trial and appellate practice in both federal and state courts. She has participated in major litigation at both levels on behalf of prisoners and on tax matters, among other issues.
As an associate professor at Yale Law, Dignam taught and supervised students in Prison Legal Services, Poverty/HIV, Landlord/Tenant and Immigration clinics, guiding students through administrative hearings, state and federal trial and appellate courts on issues ranging from state habeas claims to violations of the Voting Rights Act.
Dignam received her J.D. from the University of Southern California, where she was student director of the USC Prison Law Project and chair of the Hale Moot Court Honors Program. She has a Master of Arts degree in theater from the University of California at Los Angeles. She received her B.A. from Mount Holyoke College.
Brian Donnelly, Lecturer in Law, co-taught the Seminar in Advanced Legal Research from 1996 to 1999. He helped to found the Lawyering in the Digital Age Clinic and has collaborated for many years with Professors Conrad Johnson and Mary Zulack on the development of other efforts to teach lawyering and technology. He is the Director of Educational Technology at the Law School. In his administrative role, he is responsible for the design and operation of the Law School's world-class classroom technology, curriculum-based Internet initiatives and the integration of technology into teaching and learning.
Professor Philip Genty joined the Columbia faculty in 1989. He formerly worked as an attorney at Prisoners' Legal Services of New York; the New York City Department of Housing, Preservation and Development; and the Bedford-Stuyvesant Community Legal Services Corporation. He serves on the Family Court Advisory and Rules Committee to the Chief Administrative Judge of the State of New York; the Advisory Group of the National Institute of Corrections, Federal Resource Center for Children of Prisoners; and the Coalition for Women in Prison of the New York Correctional Association. He helped develop the Incarcerated Mothers Legal Project, coordinated by Volunteers of Legal Services, Inc., and the Women's Prison Association. He has written on issues concerning prisoners' rights and family law and has served as a trainer and consultant to many advocacy organizations. He is the co-coordinator of the first-year Legal Writing and Research program and the faculty director of the Moot Court program. Contact Information.
Law clerk to Justice Marie Garibaldi, New Jersey Supreme Court, 1990-91. Skadden Foundation Fellow with Lambda Legal Defense, 1991-93. Senior Staff Attorney with Lambda Legal Defense, 1993-2000. Adjunct Professor of Law, Fordham Law School, 1996-2000. On faculty of Rutgers Law School-Newark, 2000-2006. Visiting Professor at Columbia Law School, 2004-05.
Member of the New Jersey Civil Practice Committee of the New Jersey Supreme Court (2002-present); Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law Annual Review Board of Advisors (1999-present); founder and past president of the Board of Directors of Immigration Equality (formerly the Lesbian and Gay Immigration Rights Task Force).
Joined the Columbia faculty in Fall 2006. Currently directs Columbia's Sexuality and Gender Law Clinic and teaches Civil Procedure, Lawyering, Social Change, and the Movement for Women's and Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights.
Professor Conrad Johnson joined the Columbia faculty in 1989 after two years as an assistant professor at the City University of New York School of Law and many years as the attorney-in-charge of the Harlem neighborhood office of The Legal Aid Society. He served as Director of Clinical Education from 1992 to 1996. He co-founded, and for eleven years directed, the Law School's Fair Housing Clinic, which specialized in civil rights litigation. He is co-creator of the Law School's first distance-learning offering, the Seminar in Race-Conscious Remedies (1999), and co-created, with Brian Donnelly, the Law School's first e-course (2000), "The Impact of Technology on the Legal Profession." In 2001, he co-founded the Lawyering in the Digital Age Clinic, a pathbreaking offering that explores the impact of technology on law practice and the profession through client work and collaborative projects with major public interest legal organizations and prominent jurists. Professor Johnson is recognized nationally as a leader in innovative legal education, access to justice, technology in law practice and diversity in legal education. He is the 2013 recipient of the Professor Willis L.M. Reese Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Law School’s only teaching award.
Susan J. Kraham is a Senior Staff Attorney and Lecturer-in-Law at Columbia Law School's Environmental Law Clinic. Susan has spent her legal career representing public interest clients with a particular focus on environmental and land use law. Prior to joining the Environmental Law Clinic, Susan served as Counsel to the New Jersey Audubon Society. From 1998 until 2005 she was an Associate Clinical Professor in the Environmental Law Clinic at Rutgers Law School, Newark. Susan was a 1992 graduate of Columbia Law School. She also has a Masters in Urban Planning from New York University’s Wagner School. After graduation from Law School, Susan clerked for the Honorable Justice Gary Stein of the New Jersey Supreme Court. She was a Skadden fellow. Susan was also an echoing green fellow where she partnered on a community-based environmental justice project.
Professor Carol Liebman, Clinical Professor of Law, joined the Columbia faculty in 1992. She has lectured and taught widely on negotiation and mediation, legal education, and professional-responsibility issues, and has written about the use of mediation in a variety of contexts. Professor Liebman has been in the forefront of the movement toward Alternative Dispute Resolution and has taught in Israel, Brazil, Vietnam, and China about mediation and negotiation. She founded the Law School's Negotiation Workshop and is the faculty director of the Profession of Law class. Since 2000, Professor Liebman has made several trips to China as part of a Ford Foundation initiative to establish clinical legal-education programs at Chinese law schools.
Professor Edward Lloyd, the Evan M. Frankel Clinical Professor in Environmental Law, is the Director of Clinical Education at Columbia. He joined the Columbia Law School faculty in 2000. Formerly executive director of the New Jersey Public Interest Research Group, Professor Lloyd serves as its general counsel. He is co-director of the Eastern Environmental Law Center and a member of the Litigation Review Committee of Environmental Defense. An activist and scholar on a wide range of environmental legal issues and citizen suit litigation, Professor Lloyd has testified before U.S. Senate and House of Representatives committees on environmental enforcement. In 2002, he was appointed to the New Jersey Pinelands Commission.
Professor Peter Rosenblumjoined the Columbia faculty in the fall of 2003. He came to Columbia from Harvard Law School, where he was associate director of the Human Rights Program and initiated the school's first seminar in human rights advocacy. Rosenblum has worked in international human rights since 1989, first for the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights and then for a number of other organizations including Human Rights Watch, the International Human Rights Law Group, and the United Nations. He has extensive experience in Europe, Asia, and Africa, where he continues to pursue projects in advocacy and research. Rosenblum writes frequently on human rights and Africa and has published articles on the international criminal tribunals and human rights pedagogy.
Professor Barbara Schatz joined the Law School faculty in 1985. She served as director of clinical education from 1996 to 2001. She previously served as executive director of the Council of New York Law Associates (now the Lawyers Alliance for New York), where she administered a public-interest program involving both staff lawyers and 1,800 pro bono lawyers; founded the Community Development Legal Assistance Center; and co-founded the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights and Court Appointed Special Advocates. She has represented many nonprofit organizations in corporate, tax, and real estate matters and lectured widely about nonprofit corporate and tax law. Professor Schatz has trained and consulted with law professors interested in establishing clinical programs in China, Central and Eastern Europe, and countries of the former Soviet Union.
Professor Jane M. Spinak Professor Jane M. Spinak is the Edward Ross Aranow Clinical Professor of Law. A member of the Columbia faculty since 1982, she co-founded the Child Advocacy Clinic, which currently represents adolescents aging out of foster care. During the mid-1990s, Professor Spinak served as attorney-in-charge of the Juvenile Rights Division of The Legal Aid Society of New York City. From 2001 to 2006, she was the director of clinical education at the law school. In 2002, she became the founding chair of the board of the Center for Family Representation, an advocacy and policy organization dedicated to ensuring the procedural and substantive rights of parents in child-welfare proceedings. Professor Spinak is a member of the New York State Permanent Judicial Commission on Justice for Children. She has served on numerous tasks forces and committees addressing the needs and rights of children and families and has trained and lectured widely on those issues to lawyers, social workers and other mental health professionals. She has authored books and articles for child advocates and judges on child welfare and Family Court matters including a Permanency Planning Judicial Benchbook. Her current research focuses on Family Court reform as discussed in Adding Value to Families: The Potential of Model Family Courts (2002 Wisconsin Law Review 332) and Romancing the Court (Family Court Review, April 2008). In 2005, Professor Spinak was named a Human Rights Hero for her work on behalf of children by the ABA’s Human Rights Magazine. In 2008 she was awarded the Howard A. Levine Award for Excellence in Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare by the New York State Bar Association. Professor Spinak is currently co-chairing the Task Force on Family Court in New York City recently established by the New York County Lawyer’s Association.
Professor Mary Marsh Zulack joined the Columbia faculty in 1990. She is co-director, with Conrad Johnson and Brian Donnelly, of the Lawyering in the Digital Age Clinic. She was Director of Clinical Education at Columbia from 2005 until 2010. For many years she co-directed the Fair Housing Clinic, and she inaugurated and taught the seminar on Law and Policy of Homelessness. She was a member of the Mayor’s Advisory Committee on the Judiciary from 2006 through 2008.
In the course of her 20-year career in legal services work prior to joining the faculty, Professor Zulack served in many positions, including attorney-in-charge of the Harlem Neighborhood Office of The Legal Aid Society of New York City and Acting Executive Director of the Bedford-Stuyvesant Community Legal Services Corp. in Brooklyn. She has served the Association of the Bar of the City of New York as a member of the Executive Committee, Nominating Committee(twice), Judiciary Committee(several times), and Civil Court Committee, was founder and first chair of the Committee on Legal Needs of the Poor. She has been honored with the 1996 Leadership Award by the Citywide Task Force on the Housing Court, as well as with awards for outstanding Pro Bono service by the Legal Aid Society in 2003, 2006, and 2009.
Columbia Law School
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For general information about clinical education at Columbia Law School, please contact Professor Edward Lloyd, director of clinical education, as follows, or any of the faculty listed below.
212-854-4291
