2015 TRUST WOMEN ACTION: "TrustLaw Litigation for Trafficking"

2015 TRUST WOMEN ACTION: "TrustLaw Litigation for Trafficking"

Whoa this is so cool!!!

See video of the presentation here:
http://www.trustwomenconf.com/actions/i/?id=642109e0-e8fc-4235-b2f7-6faec4e3ed18&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=TWC%20Actions%20Update&utm_content=TWC%20Actions%20Update+CID_01ad98f0637e79db5e4ce63222cd9665&utm_source=Campaign%20Monitor&utm_term=TrustLaw%20Litigation%20Hub%20for%20Trafficking%20and%20Modern%20Slavery

Or here: https://youtu.be/8VF-4BNTIRI

Presented by Martina Vandenberg - Founder and President, The Human Trafficking Pro Bono Legal Center

Summary: A hub bringing together lawyers and NGOs in the fight for justice by enabling advocates to share best practices in anti-trafficking litigation.

How to figure out what you want

This will force you to think specifically.

Imagine that it's your 50th birthday. You just posted a photo on Instagram/Facebook/etc.

What does that photo look like?
Where are you?
Who are you with (friends, spouse/partner, dog/cat/???)?
What other things are in the photo (background)?
What are you doing?
What are other people in the photo (if any) doing?
How much money are you spending that night?
On what items?

[NYT] How to Fix Feminism by Judith Shulevitz

http://nyti.ms/1XJkSeP

How to Fix Feminism

Hillary Clinton’s generation aimed to free women
from domestic prisons. But work is a prison, too.

Judith Shulevitz JUNE 10, 2016

HILLARY CLINTON’S securing of the Democratic nomination doesn’t just put a woman in range of the White House; it puts a mother there. And that’s momentous. Over the past half-century, unmarried childless women have overcome every barrier to opportunity you can think of, and now earn 96 percent of what men do. Mothers, on the other hand, aren’t doing nearly as well: Married mothers are paid 76 cents on the dollar.

To me, Mrs. Clinton’s sheer professional survival is as inspiring as any of her other accomplishments. A woman with a small child can easily lose faith that she’ll ever do anything else again. God knows I did. For the first five years of my child-rearing life, I was supposed to be writing a book, but mostly I dodged my editor’s calls. The 3-year-old had separation anxiety, so I waited it out on one of the nursery school’s kid-size chairs. I lacked the heart to say no to play dates, so I shut my computer and attended to juice boxes.

Then there was Ladies’ Night, when the mothers on my cul-de-sac got together to drink too much wine. Fun, sure, but really: “Ladies’ Night”? The fact that I went every week proved that my professional viability was fast disappearing, or so I thought at the time.

How did Mrs. Clinton hold on to hers? How did she rebound from the years in which she was raising a daughter, pursuing a law career and serving as first lady of Arkansas? She has a steely will, as everyone knows. But another answer is that it was in many ways easier to be a working mother in 1980, when Chelsea Clinton was born, than it is today.

Between the ’80s and the aughts, when I had my children, a cloud of economic anxiety descended on parents, tightening what the sociologist Arlie Hochschild has called “the time bind.” The workweek of salaried professionals ballooned from 40 hours to 50 hours or more, not counting the email catch-up done after the kids’ bedtime. Union protections, predictable schedules and benefits vanished for vast numbers of blue-collar workers. Their jobs in the service or on-demand economies now pay so little, and child care costs so much (168 percent more than it did a quarter-century ago) that parents have to stitch together multiple jobs. Meanwhile, terrified that their offspring will sink even lower, parents siphon off time and money to hand-raise children who can compete in a global economy.

Women like me who scale back in the face of impossible expectations feel themselves morphing into caricatures: attachment freaks, helicopter moms, concerted cultivators, neo-traditionalists. These stereotypes are just plain sexist, but I don’t know many mothers whose careers, paychecks and sense of self-worth haven’t been eroded by all the compromises they’ve had to make. Our worlds have narrowed; our bank accounts have dipped below the minimum balance; and our power within the family and the world has dwindled. We’d be quick to tell you that we wouldn’t have done it any differently. Still.

What if the world was set up in such a way that we could really believe — not just pretend to — that having spent a period of time concentrating on raising children at the expense of future earnings would bring us respect? And what if that could be as true for men as it is for women?

We live in an age rich in feminisms. One celebrates our multiplicity of identities: black, lesbian, transgender. Another has effectively anathematized sexual violence. Yet another — I think of it as C-suite feminism — chips away at the glass ceiling that keeps women out of the most powerful jobs, such as, say, the presidency.

But we need another feminism — and it needs a name that has nothing to do with gender. Let’s call it, for lack of a better term, “caregiverism.” It would demand dignity and economic justice for parents dissatisfied with a few weeks of unpaid parental leave, and strive to mitigate the sacrifices made by adult children responsible for aging parents.

Mrs. Clinton could be a champion of caregiverism. She has been blunter this electoral season about family-friendly policies than she has ever been before. She emphasized paid family leave when she began her campaign and again in the opening statements of the first Democratic presidential debate. In May, she said she’d cap the cost of child care at 10 percent of a household’s income, down from what, for a household supported by minimum-wage workers, can now be more than 30 percent.

But she needs to go further. Her focus is on wage-earners; what about the people who want to get out of the workplace, at least for a while? Mrs. Clinton should talk to Representative Nita Lowey of New York, who last year introduced a bill that would give Social Security credits to caregivers who left the labor market or cut back on hours — a public nod to the reality that care is work and caregivers merit the same benefits as other workers.

Mrs. Clinton belongs to an earlier generation, one whose objective was to free women from the prison of domesticity — at least the middle-class women who didn’t already have jobs — and send them marching into the work force to demand equality there. But true equality will take more than equal pay and better working conditions. It will require something more radical, a “transvaluation of all values,” in Nietzsche’s phrase.

Am I calling for a counterrevolution? I don’t think so. Feminists have not always seen work as the answer to women’s problems. Many who put in sweatshop hours in the textile industry or open-ended days in domestic service fought for the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which established the 40-hour workweek. Working women “were not just organizable; they were the best constituency for struggle over the working day,” write David Roediger and Philip Foner in “Our Own Time: A History of American Labor and the Working Day.”

There is also a venerable tradition in feminist history of trying to overturn a status quo that esteems professionals and wage-earners while demeaning those who do the unpaid or low-paid work of emotional sustenance and physical upkeep. In the 1960s, the largely African-American National Welfare Rights Organization demanded welfare payments that would maintain a decent standard of living, partly on the grounds that these mothers were working already, raising future workers, and partly because they couldn’t find jobs that would support them. “I am 45 years old; I have raised six children,” wrote the group’s chairwoman, Johnnie Tillmon, in 1972. “A job doesn’t necessarily mean an adequate income. There are some 10 million jobs that now pay less than the minimum wage, and if you’re a woman, you’ve got the best chance of getting one.”

Around the same time, the Marxist feminists Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James began a campaign called Wages for Housework that called for the overthrow of a capitalist order subsidized, in their view, by the unpaid slog of homemaking and, yes, sexual services. This did not mean that women should necessarily go out and find jobs. “Not one of us believes that emancipation, liberation, can be achieved through work,” they wrote. “Slavery to an assembly line is not liberation from slavery to a kitchen sink.”

Liberal feminists accused them of wanting to push women back into domestic drudgery, but they denied it. “We have worked enough,” they wrote. “We have chopped billions of tons of cotton, washed billions of dishes, scrubbed billions of floors, typed billions of words, wired billions of radio sets, washed billions of nappies, by hand and in machines.” So what did they want? I asked Silvia Federici, a founder of the New York chapter of Wages for Housework who writes prolifically on these questions. Actual wages for housework aside, she said, the movement wanted to make people ask themselves, “Why is producing cars more valuable than producing children?”

The expectation that all mothers will work has been especially hard on single mothers. When Franklin D. Roosevelt established the welfare program Aid to Dependent Children in 1935 it was a given that poor single mothers would tend to their young (poor single white mothers, I should say, because black women were expected to hold jobs). By the 1970s, that presumption having vanished, Ronald Reagan could argue that welfare mothers were “lazy parasites” and “pigs at the trough,” laying the groundwork for welfare reform.

The program put in place by Bill Clinton in 1996, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, cuts off benefits after five years or less; forces women to hold or look for jobs, whether or not there are any to be had; and allows states to shunt welfare funds into other programs. And so, from 1996 to 2011, the number of families living in extreme poverty — on $2 per person a day or less — more than doubled. A majority of those households were headed by single mothers.

IN an important new book, “Finding Time,” the economist Heather Boushey argues that the failure of government and businesses to replace the services provided by “America’s silent partner” — the stay-at-home wife — is dampening productivity and checking long-term economic growth. A company that withholds family leave may drive away a hard-to-replace executive. Overstressed parents lack the time and patience to help children develop the skills they need to succeed. “Today’s children are tomorrow’s work force,” Ms. Boushey writes. “What happens inside families is just as important to making the economy hum along as what happens inside firms.”

Knowing that motherhood can derail a career, women are waiting longer and longer to have children. In the United States, first-time mothers have aged nearly five years since 1970 — as of 2014, they were 26.3 as opposed to 21.4. Some 40 percent of women with bachelor’s degrees have their first child at 30 or older. Fathers are waiting along with the mothers — what else can they do?

I had my children at 39 and 40. (Mrs. Clinton was 32.) My 12-year-old daughter is already calculating how soon she’ll have to have children if I’m going to be strong enough to lift them. Younger than I was, I tell her. But she’s bright and ambitious. I could see her going to graduate school.

I recently got into an argument with a professor friend about the plausibility of restructuring higher education and the professions so that women — and men — wouldn’t have to hustle for positions like partner or associate professor just as they reach peak fertility. Many universities, I said, now stop the tenure clock for a year when assistant professors have children. My friend laughed. A year is nothing when it comes to a baby, she said. She’d never have won tenure if she’d had her son first.

I didn’t know what to say. At least she had a child, unlike friends who waited until too late.

Here’s a fantasy my daughter and I entertain: What if child-rearing weren’t an interruption to a career but a respected precursor to it, like universal service or the draft? Both sexes would be expected to chip in, and the state would support young parents the way it now supports veterans. This is more or less what Scandinavian countries already do. A mother might take five years off, then focus on her career, at which point the father could put his on pause. Or vice versa.

Vice versa was the deal struck by characters on the Danish TV series “Borgen,” a member of Parliament and her husband. He’d schlep and clean for five years; then she’d do the same. (As it turned out, she became prime minister and their marriage went to hell. But that’s a problem few of us would ever have to face.)

What really makes the “Borgen” model a mismatch for the United States is that American families, particularly low-income families, can’t do without a double income, given wage stagnation and the cost of children in a country that won’t help parents raise them. But having to work should not be confused with wanting to work, at least not without some stops along the way. “It takes 20 years, not 12 weeks, to raise a child,” as the feminist legal scholar Joan Williams has written.

Those 20 years are what made Sheryl Sandberg’s exhortation to women to “lean in,” or work extra hard, before and after they started families, seem so ludicrous. (Ms. Sandberg has softened her stance since her husband’s death last May. “I did not really get how hard it is to succeed at work when you are overwhelmed at home,” she recently wrote.) When Marissa Mayer, now chief executive of Yahoo, reported that when she was in Google’s employ, she slept under her desk, one disgusted feminist, Sarah Leonard, wrote, “If feminism means the right to sleep under my desk, then screw it.”

But what should feminism mean instead? One thing it should not mean is a politics of the possible. We’re fighting for 12 weeks of leave when we need to rethink the basic chronology of our lives. We live longer than we used to. A caregiverist agenda should include stretching career paths across that longer life span, making it easier for parents of both sexes to drop in and out of the work force as the need arises. Automation may eliminate jobs in all sorts of fields. Perhaps we should lobby for a six-hour workday, yielding both more jobs and more time for family.

It’s a little late for me, if not, thank goodness, for my daughter. I fled my cul-de-sac before I should have, in part because I convinced myself that it was becoming a lovely, leafy, azalea-pink prison. City life is great, thank you, but I have regrets. I should have gone on longer rambles with the babies; blown more deadlines; been quicker to heed my son’s demand to “see train” at the nearby station. The articles could have waited; the sight of a little boy clapping as a train squealed to a stop could not. As for Ladies’ Night, it took me a long time to assemble a coterie of mothers as genial and supportive. If I’m ashamed of anything now, it’s how little I appreciated them then.


Judith Shulevitz will be answering questions via live video on our Facebook page on Tuesday, June 14, at 4:30 EST. Post a question here or on our Facebook page.

She is on Twitter (@JudithShulevitz). She is the author of “The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time” and a contributing opinion writer.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on June 12, 2016, on page SR1 of the New York edition with the headline: How to Fix Feminism.

http://nyti.ms/1XJkSeP

Mozart In The Jungle Season 2 !!!!!

https://www.instagram.com/p/_8EyPzJ_r4/
Aaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh where the heck is that apartment and how did they find it????? Part of the reason why I love this series is its use of location: NYC can be such a shitty place sometimes, especially in the winter and when/where it's crowded (that's virtually ALL THE TIME and ALL OF MIDTOWN/DOWNTOWN) but the way portray NYC in this series makes it look like some magical wonderland where love and passion and art are alive and the air is teeming with possibilities. They show you what it feels like to live and work in NYC on a good day, but of course because this is something of a romantic comedy, NYC is feels so good on any and every day shown in the series.

https://www.instagram.com/p/_7Umc0J_sW/
What are you talking about?
Love the way he pronounces Hailey lol

https://www.instagram.com/p/_5f4IgJ_q6/
Oh man. If ever I had a fling with Gael Garcia Bernal and HE told me it wasn't all a fantasy, I would leave everything behind RIGHT NOW and be his lover/second wife/whatever he wants to call me for all eternity.

Missing Jon Stewart (and fake news in general)

Gawd I miss this man so much. I should have illegally recorded all the episodes when they did the month of zen thing. I miss hearing his voice every night and admittedly The Daily Show was my primary source of news for some time. (If they discussed something during the show that i felt was interesting or important, I would look further into it, but otherwise I really did not use any other means of knowing what was happening in the world.) There is still no other show quite like it.. Sure late night shows  tinker with topical political issues from time to time, but never with the depth and seriousness with with which TDS has been doing for 17 + years. I love Last Week Tonight with John Oliver for the same reason. These shows discuss issues that I really care about in a manner that doesn't make me depressed. I have adored Trevor Noah as a comic for quite some time but as host of TDS? I can't, because my standards for TDS has already been set to JStew. He is doing a really great job but the show definitely is not what it used to be when Jon was hosting it (esp. with all the old correspondents moving on to greener pastures..). I feel that TDS lacks the authority it had built up over the past 16 years, and at the moment it looks to me like just a group of smart kids poking fun at the news in a lighthearted manner and not ready to face any bad consequences. Maybe they'll build up their credibility and authority over time.

Here's a throwback to one of the most memorable episodes of Jon's last couple of months as host of TDS. http://digg.com/video/jon-stewart-no-words-huckabee-daily-show-urgh
Is it possible to explode and die because you like something so much? This takes me pretty close.

고지운 변호사

http://mnews.koreanbar.or.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=11034
대한변협 인터뷰

http://m.sisainlive.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=16813
시사인 2013

http://hopeandlaw.org/101
희망법 공익변호사 양성을 위한 라운드테이블 2013

http://m.hankooki.com/t_view.php?WM=sk&FILE_NO=ZTIwMTQwMzMxMTcxMzQ0OTM4MDAuaHRt&ref=www.google.co.kr
서울변호사회 사무실 2년간 무상 제공

http://mwtv0416.cafe24.com/?r=home&c=5/34&cat=%EC%9D%B4%EC%A3%BC%EB%85%B8%EB%8F%99%EC%9E%90+%EC%84%B8%EC%83%81+%EC%8B%9C%EC%A6%8C2&uid=39
이주민방송 MWTV 2014 11월

https://m.lawtimes.co.kr/Legal-News/Legal-News-View?Serial=82821
난민법률지원변호사단 2014 3월
법률신문

[NYT] The Immigration Dividend

http://nyti.ms/1Q3rJIq

The Opinion Pages | OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

The Immigration Dividend

By TED WIDMEROCT. 6, 2015  

IMMIGRATION is not the easiest issue to debate. It stokes emotions about “homelands” and invasions, as we have seen all summer, both in the Republican presidential contest and in the tragic situation in Europe. These arguments tend to produce more heat than light, making objective analysis difficult. Many politicians find that their poll numbers rise the further from reality they stray — as the Donald J. Trump playbook continues to prove. A recent Pew report confirms that the parties remain far apart, with Republicans far more certain than Democrats (53 percent versus 24 percent) that immigration is making our society worse.

But history provides some clarity about the relative costs and benefits of immigration over time. Fifty years ago this month, Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 at the foot of the Statue of Liberty. By any standard, it made the United States a stronger nation. The act was endorsed by Republicans and Democrats in an era when cooperation was still possible. Indeed, the most serious opposition came from Southern Democrats and an ambivalent secretary of state, Dean Rusk. But it passed the Senate easily (76-18), with skillful leadership from its floor manager, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, and Johnson himself.

Since 1924, United States immigration policy had been based on a formula, derived from the 1890 census, that made it relatively easy for Northern Europeans to immigrate. But the formula set strict limits for everyone else. That seemed ridiculous to John F. Kennedy, who was trying to win hearts and minds in the Cold War, and it seemed even more so to his successor in 1965, as Johnson was escalating the war in Vietnam. The act’s passage was one of the few positive legacies of that complex moment in American foreign policy.

Johnson promised his opponents that the act would “not reshape the structure of our daily lives.” But that prediction proved utterly untrue. By destroying the old national-origins system, the act opened the floodgates to the parts of the world that had been excluded in the past.

What ensued was arguably the most significant period of immigration in American history. Nearly 59 million people have come to the United States since 1965, and three-quarters of them came from Latin America and Asia. It was not unrestrained immigration — the act created preferences for those with technical training, or family members in the United States. But it was vastly more open than what had come before.

There is little doubt that the act succeeded in the ways that its progressive supporters hoped — it made America a genuinely New Frontier, younger and more diverse, truer to its ideals. But it also was a success when measured by a more conservative calculus of hard power. It certainly increased American security. Significant numbers of immigrants and their children joined the United States military after 1965, and in every category the armed forces became more ethnically diverse.

The flood of new immigrants also promoted prosperity in ways that few could have imagined in 1965. Between 1990 and 2005, as the digital age took off, 25 percent of the fastest-growing American companies were founded by people born in foreign countries.

Much of the growth of the last two decades has stemmed from the vast capacity that was delivered by the Internet and the personal computer, each of which was accelerated by immigrant ingenuity. Silicon Valley, especially, was transformed. In a state where Asian immigrants had once faced great hardship, they helped to transform the global economy. The 2010 census stated that more than 50 percent of technical workers in Silicon Valley are Asian-American.

Google was co-founded by Sergey Brin, who emigrated from the Soviet Union with his parents at age 6. The new C.E.O. of United Airlines is Mexican-American. And an extraordinary number of Indian-Americans have risen to become chief executives of other major American corporations, including Adobe Systems, Pepsi, Motorola and Microsoft.

In countless other ways, as well, we might measure the improvements since 1965. A prominent AIDS researcher, David Ho, came to this country as a 12-year-old from Taiwan. Immigrants helped take the space program to new places, and sometimes gave their lives in that cause (an Indian-American astronaut, Kalpana Chawla, perished in the Columbia space shuttle disaster). Almost no one would argue for a return to pre-1965 American cuisine, which became incomparably more interesting as it grew more diverse. Baseball has become a more dynamic game as it, too, has looked south and west. The list goes on and on.

There will always be debates over immigration, and it’s important to acknowledge that opponents of immigration are usually correct when they argue that immigration brings dramatic change. But a careful consideration of the 1965 Immigration Act shows that our willingness to lower barriers made this a better country. To convey that hard-earned wisdom to other nations wrestling with the same issues, and to open our own doors more widely, would be a modest way to repay the great contributions that immigrants have made on a daily basis to the United States over the past 50 years.

Ted Widmer is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs. He edited “Listening In: The Secret White House Recordings of John F. Kennedy.”

A version of this op-ed appears in print on October 6, 2015, on page A31 of the New York edition with the headline: The Immigration Dividend. 

http://nyti.ms/1Q3rJIq

공익인권법재단 공감과 외국법자문법률사무소협회와의 업무협약식

http://withgonggam.tistory.com/1724

2015.09.23 15:38

공익인권법재단 공감과 외국법자문법률사무소협회와의 업무협약식

공익인권법재단 공감(이하 ‘공감’)과 외국법자문법률사무소협회(이하 ‘외국로펌협회’)는 2015년 9월 7일 미래에셋 빌딩에서 외국로펌의 공익활동중개를 위한 협력 및 교류를 내용으로 하여 업무협약(MOU)을 체결하였습니다. 공감과 외국로펌협회는 공감이 진행하는 공익소송에 있어 외국로펌협회 산하 외국법 자문사들이 관련 국제법 및 영미법 자문, 공감이 지원하는 비영리 시민사회 사업에 관한 외국법 자문 및 공익법·제도 개선을 위한 연구조사 등에 대한 법률지원 관련하여 상호 협력하기로 하였습니다.

  

외국로펌협회는 공감의 공익법 활동에 관해 필요한 인적·물적 지원을 제공하도록 노력하며, 공감은 외국로펌협회의 공익활동 프로그램 개발·중개 및 공익법 활동 활성화를 위한 공익단체와의 네트워크 형성을 지원하도록 노력하기로 하였습니다. 또한, 공감과 외국로펌협회는 각자 업무수행이나 학술연구에 필요하다고 인정하는 경우 학술정보 등 필요한 자료를 공유하거나 제공하는 데에 상호 협력하기로 하였습니다.

  

이날 협약식에는 공감 측에서 안경환 이사장, 염형국 변호사, 황필규 변호사가 참석하였고, 외국로펌협회 측에서는 이원조 회장을 비롯하여 박진원 O'Melveny & Myers 대표, 이용국 Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton 대표, 김현석 Clifford Chance 대표, 윤석주 K&L Gates 대표가 참석하여 양 기관 간의 앞으로의 협력 방향에 대하여 폭넓게 논의하였습니다. 

* 관련 언론 기사  

[한국경제] 사회공헌 나서는 외국로펌…공익인권법재단과 MOU

[매일경제] 외자협-공익인권법재단 공익법 협력 MOU
[리걸타임즈] 외국법자문사들도 공감 활동 동참

http://withgonggam.tistory.com/1724

객관성이 담보되는 난민심사를 위하여 - 박영아 변호사

http://withgonggam.tistory.com/1736

[공변의 변] 객관성이 담보되는 난민심사를 위하여 - 박영아 변호사

지난달 터키 해안에 떠밀려온 아일란의 모습을 담은 사진 한장이 전 세계인들의 가슴을 먹먹하게 만들었다. 이 아이가 왜 어린 나이에 고향을 떠나 밤중 위험한 항해를 감행해야만 했을까? 사진을 본 모든 이들이 품고 있는 질문이었을 것이다. 난민들을 태운 배들의 목적지인 유럽에서의 반향은 더욱 컸다. 동부유럽에 도착한 시리아 난민들의 입국을 허용키로 한 독일에는 매일 10,000명의 난민들이 몰려오고 있다. 올 한 해 동안 독일에 입국하는 난민들의 수가 백만명에 이를 것으로 예상되고 있다. 2014년 난민신청자수가 약 20만명이었고, 당시도 이미 감당하기 어려운 수준에 이르렀다는 평가가 팽배했던 것에 비추어보면 실로 상상하기 어려운 숫자이다. (참고로, 우리나라의 경우 1994년부터 누적된 난민신청자 수는 2015. 6.기준으로 11,172명이다.)

  우리나라도 예외는 아니었다. 난민에 대한 사람들의 관심은 어느 때보다 높아졌고, 언론에서도 난민에 관한 보도를 쏟아내기 시작했다. 하지만 그것도 잠시, 난민들의 이야기는 어느새 다시 우리들의 관심에서 멀어져 가고 있다. 그래서 이 자리를 빌어 지금 지원하고 있는 난민신청자에 관한 이야기를 잠깐 풀어낼까 한다.

  A는 2012년부터 3년 넘게 화성외국인보호소에 구금되어 있다. 전에 다른 명의로 입국하였다가 강제퇴거당한 이력이 있고, 난민신청할 때 그 사실을 바로 밝히지 않았다 하여 강제퇴거명령을 받고 구금된 것이다. 강제퇴거이력을 바로 밝히지 않은 것이 난민신청이 기각된 주된 사유이기도 했다. 하지만 이전의 입국이력은 그의 난민신청사유와 아무런 관련이 없고, 그 후 문제가 생겨 본국을 탈출하게 된 경위에 관한 그의 진술은 매우 구체적이고 일관적이다. 그는 난민신청을 할 때 통역이나 도와줄 사람이 없어 난민신청서 접수를 위해 출입국관리사무소만 세 번이나 찾아가야 할 정도로 어려움이 많았고, 신청서와 진술서를 모국어가 아닌 영어로 작성할 것을 요구받은 상황에서 일단 난민신청사유에 집중하는 것이 좋겠다고 생각했었다고 말했다. 예전에 출입국관리사무소를 찾아갈 때 난민신청자가 통역해줄 사람과 같이 안 왔다는 이유로 발길을 돌려야만 하는 장면을 본 적이 있고, 영어나 한국어가 아닌 신청인의 모국어로 작성된 난민신청서를 본 기억이 없기 때문에 수긍되는 설명이었다. 그를 화성외국인보호소에 면회하러 갈 때 한겨울에도 양말 없이 슬리퍼만 신고 있는 경우가 많다. 양말이 한 켤레밖에 지급되지 않기 때문에 빨래하는 날에는 신을 양말이 없기 때문이다. 하지만 상태가 어떠냐고 물어보면 항상 괜찮다고 한다. 보호소는 적어도 본국으로 돌아가는 것보다 안전하다는 것이다. 물론 그가 말해준 내용 중 부정확하거나 허위사실이 있을 수 있다. 다른 난민신청사건과 마찬가지로, 과거로 돌아가 사건을 직접 목격하거나, 그의 머리 속에 들어가지 않는 한 알 수 없는 것이다. 그러나 적어도 오로지 난민신청사유와 아무런 상관이 없는 사항을 이유로 그의 진술의 신빙성을 모두 부인하는 것은 객관적 난민심사와 거리가 멀다고 생각한다.

  B는 을국 출신으로, 이슬람을 국교로 삼는 본국에서 이단으로 취급되고 있는 소수종파에 속한다. 그는 여권상 종교가 이슬람으로 표기되어 있었다는 이유로 난민신청이 기각되었다. 그는 여권 발행은 대사관에서 했고, 왜 이슬람으로 기재되었는지 알 수 없지만, 자기가 속한 소수종파도 이슬람에 속하기 때문에 괜찮다고 생각했기 때문에 여권을 다시 발행받지 않았다고 설명했지만 소용이 없었다. 친형이 독일에서 난민인정을 받았다는 서류도 제출했지만 고려조차 되지 않았다. 법원에 소송을 제기했다. 하지만 법원에서도 여권기재가 계속 문제가 되었다. 그래서 대사관에 가서 종교란을 수정해달라고 했다. 대사관 직원은 해당 부분을 화이트로 지우고 B의 종교란을 수기로 정정한 후 도장을 찍었다. B는 이렇게 해서 정정된 여권을 항소심 법원에 제출했다. 항소심 판결에는 여권 변조가 기각사유로 추가되었다. B의 사건을 직접 맡게 된 것은 상고심에 계류중일 때였다. 형의 난민인정서류에 기재된 독일 변호사의 이름을 인터넷으로 검색해보았다. 이메일 주소가 하나 나와서 무작정 메일을 보내보았다. 의뢰인에게 연락해서 동생이 한국에서 난민신청했는지, 내가 동생의 변호사인지 확인하고, 맞다면 판결문을 보내달라는 취지였다. 얼마 후 독일 변호사로부터 답장이 왔다. 자신의 의뢰인이 모든 사실을 확인해주었다는 것이다. 독일 변호사는 운 좋게도 생면부지의 한국인으로부터 온 메일을 무시하지 않았고, 사건이 이미 완료되었고 통역이 필요함에도 의뢰인에게 다시 연락하는 수고도 아끼지 않았다. B는 재신청 결과 인도적 체류허가를 받았다.

  C는 B와 같은 소수종파에 속한다. 해당 소수종파는 세계 각국에서 지부를 두고 있는데 한국지부에 속한 신자는 약 40명으로 상대적으로 소규모이다. C는 2001년 한국 입국 직후 한국지부에 가입하여 신앙생활을 이어갔으며, 수년전부터 대구지부 대표를 맡고 있다. C는 2009년 난민신청을 하였다. 처음 입국 당시에는 한국에 난민제도가 있는 줄 몰랐기 때문에 바로 신청을 하지 못했던 것이다. 출입국관리사무소는 2012년에 그의 난민신청을 기각하였다. 여권 종교란에 종교가 이슬람으로 기재되어 있어 해당 소수종파에 속한다는 것을 믿을 수 없다는 이유였다. 오로지 난민신청사유를 만들기 위해 (주류종파에서 이단으로 취급하며 혐오하는) 소수종파에 가입하여 신자행세를 하고 대구지부 대표까지 맡았다는 것이다. 소송을 제기했지만, 1심 법원의 판결도 다르지 않았다. 항소심에서 2000년대 초부터 국내 지부에서 활동한 사진들을 찾아내 증거로 제출했다. 그 결과 항소심에서 드디어 소수종파 신자로 인정받았다. 하지만 본국과 한국에서 적극적인 종교활동을 해왔음을 증명하지 않았다는 이유로 난민으로 인정받지 못했다. 판결문에 “적극적” 종교활동의 기준이 무엇인지는 언급되어 있지 않으나, 종교활동이 박해로 이어질 수 있는 국가와 그렇지 않은 국가에서의 종교활동의 “적극성”을 판단할 때 다른 기준을 적용해야 한다는 점은 고려한 것으로 보이지 않는다. 대구지부 대표를 맡은 것 이상의 “적극성”이 무엇인지에 대한 언급도 없다. 다만 여권 종교란에 종교가 이슬람으로 기재되어 있고, “신체적ㆍ물리적 침해를 받지 않았다고 볼만 한 자료가 없다”는 점을 중요하게 고려한 것으로 보인다. 박해를 피하기 위해 본국을 탈출한 것인데, 실제로 “신체적ㆍ물리적 침해” 받아보아야 난민으로 인정하겠다는 것인가. 소수종파 신자임이 확인되었음에도 여전히 여권 종교란 기재에 무게를 둔 사유도 명확하지 않다.

  D는 북부 아프리카 출신 난민신청자이다. D는 성적 지향을 사유로 난민신청을 하였다. 미등록 체류하다 단속이 되어 외국인보호소에 수용된 후였다. 본국에서 겪어온 일들에 관한 그의 진술은 절절했다. 외국인보호소에서 불인정결정을 받았지만, 법무부에 이의신청을 한 결과 다행히 인도적 체류허가를 받고 외국인보호소에서 석방되었다. 하지만 난민으로 인정된 게 아니기 때문에 소송을 제기했다. 상대방은 진술의 신뢰성과 박해가능성을 인정할 수 없다는 취지의 답변서를 제출했다. 쟁점을 정리하기 위하여 인도적 체류허가 사유를 밝혀줄 것을 요청했지만, 법무부는 불가하다는 입장을 고수하였다. 1심에서 승소하였다. 사건은 지금 항소심에 계류 중이다.

  난민심사는 언어도 다르고, 문화적, 사회적, 역사적 배경이 다른 나라에서 탈출한 신청자가 처한 구체적 상황을 이해하고, 그가 박해를 받을 우려가 있는지 여부를 판단하는 과정이라 할 수 있다. 타국에서 일어날 가능성이 있는 일의 예측을 본질로 하는 것인 만큼 쉽지 않고, 무엇보다 생소한 작업이다. 나아가, 난민신청자의 진술 외에 구체적 증거가 없는 경우가 많다. 신청자가 증거를 미리 확보해놓거나 탈출 과정에서 챙기지 못한 경우가 대부분이기 때문이다. 그러다 보니 위의 사례들에서 볼 수 있는 것처럼 신청자의 여권기재, 난민신청시기, 출입국이력, 입국경위 등 객관적으로 확인이 가능하지만 난민신청사유와 직접적 관련성이 없는 사실에 지나친 무게가 부여되는 경향이 있다. 그러나 이와 같은 태도는 오히려 심사의 객관성을 해친다.

  난민사건에서 신청자의 진술이 핵심적 증거가 된다. 물론 난민신청자 진술은 항상 액면으로 받아들일 수 없다. 따라서 신빙성에 대한 평가가 매우 중요하다. 신빙성이 판단에 심사하는 사람의 주관이 개입되는 것은 어쩔 수 없는 측면도 있다. 그러나 그럴수록 주관을 최대한 배제하도록 노력할 필요가 있다. 신빙성을 배척할 때 객관적이고 명확한 이유의 제시가 중요한 이유다. “내가 믿을 수 있도록 설득시켜 봐라”는 식의 태도는 오로지 심사자 본인의 개인적 경험과 주관에 의존하겠다는 것으로 객관성 있는 접근이라 볼 수 없다.

  난민심사는 본디 매우 불충분한 도구를 가지고 매우 어려운 과제(난민신청자가 처한 구체적 상황을 이해하고 장래의 박해가능성을 예측)를 수행해야 하는 어려움이 있다. 그러나 이와 같은 어려움은 난민의 정의가 요구하는 박해가능성에 관한 상당히 낮은 수준의 입증정도로 상당부분 완화된다. 난민협약이 요구하는 것은 “박해를 받을 것이라는 충분한 근거가 있는 두려움”이다. 유엔난민기구는 이에 대해 “심리적 상태이며 주관적 조건인 두려움에는 ‘충분한 근거가 있는’이라는 조건이 추가되어 있다”고 설명한다. 달리 표현한다면 난민신청자가 박해를 두려워하는 객관적 근거가 있다면, 박해가 발생할 확률적 가능성을 따지지 않는다는 것이다. 단지 10%의 박해가능성만 인정되어도 난민으로 인정된다는 것이 다수 협약 당사국의 확립된 판례이다. 달리 말하면, 박해받을 가능성이 박해받지 않을 가능성보다 낮더라도, 실제적 가능성이 있다면 난민에 해당되는 것이다. 하지만 현행의 실무에서는 박해가 임박했다는 확신이 들어야 안심하고 난민으로 인정하는 듯하다. 그러나 역사적, 문화적, 사회적, 언어적 배경이 다른 나라에서 장래 벌어질 가능성이 있는 사건을 판단할 때 확신이란 애초부터 있을 수 없다.

  물론 난민신청자가 처한 구체적 상황을 이해하려고 노력할 필요가 있다. 위에서 언급했듯이 난민협약상 난민요건의 핵심 중 하나는 “박해를 받을 것이라는 충분한 근거가 있는 우려”이다. 신청자의 마음속으로 들어가 볼 것을 요구하는 것이다. 하지만 그렇다고 해서 전혀 다른 나라에서 태어나고 자란 사람이 자신의 주관적 입장에서 판단하라는 것은 아니다.

  난민인정은 난민신청자에 대한 포상이 아니다. 마음에 드는 사람에게 자격을 부여하는 재량사항도 아니다. 난민신청자가 난민협약에서 정한 난민요건에 해당하는지 확인하는 것에 불과하다. 자격도 없는 사람을 난민으로 인정할까봐 두려움을 가질 필요가 없다. 두려워해야 하는 것은 박해받을 가능성이 있는 사람을 돌려보내는 일이다. 난민여부는 관상으로 알 수 없고, 점을 쳐서도 알 수 없다. 진실도 100% 알아낼 재간이 없다. 그런 만큼 공정한 절차를 거쳐서 객관적 근거와 기준을 가지고 난민심사를 했는지가 무엇보다 중요한 것이다.

글_박영아 변호사

http://withgonggam.tistory.com/1736

Cornell Law School Exemplary Public Service Award

The Online Version
of the Magazine
of Cornell Law School 

Spring 2015

Volume 41, No 1

http://forum.lawschool.cornell.edu/Vol41_No1/Feature-4.cfm

Celebrating a Decade of the Exemplary Public Service Award

by KENNETH BERKOWITZ | ILLUSTRATION by FELICITA SALA | EVENT PHOTOGRAPHY by SHERYL D. SINKOW
In the eleven years since Karen Comstock was named assistant dean for public service, and in the six years since she was joined by Elizabeth Peck, director of public service, the program has grown exponentially.

The Office of Public Service now offers in-depth, one-on-one career counseling, with Comstock and Peck providing help researching job opportunities, finding externships, networking with alumni, building résumés and cover letters, and developing interview skills. There are funds available to every first- and second-year student who chooses to spend the summer working in the public interest, and an extensive loan forgiveness program for graduates who begin their career in the public sector.

Comstock and Peck begin with the broadest possible definition of public service, one that encompasses government agencies, legal aid offices, community groups, foundations, nonprofit organizations, judges' chambers, and law firms focusing on class action and impact litigation that benefit the public. To showcase the breadth of possibilities, they coordinate student pro bono opportunities every term, and each spring, they host a trio of events that highlight alumni working in the public interest. There's a lecture series featuring a major address by a leading practitioner; a career symposium for students led by recent Cornell Law School graduates; and a reception to honor the alumni winners of the Law School's Exemplary Public Service Awards, held at the Association of the Bar of the City of New York.

"The honorees are people who think about how they can best use their legal skills for the public good," says Comstock. "They get up in the morning thinking about what's most meaningful in their career, and how they can make a contribution to the world around them. That's what's important to them, and that's a value this institution feels very strongly about. That's what we mean by 'lawyers in the best sense.' You have this powerful degree. How are you going to use it?"

Over the past ten years, the Exemplary Public Service Awards have honored close to one hundred alumni working both inside and outside the legal profession. In any given year, there are recent grad "rising stars" standing alongside Cornellians who have been in the field for decades, and in even the small, tenthanniversary sample that follows, with one portrait for each year of the awards, there's an enormous range of work being done in the public interest, with a rare opportunity for people to be celebrated for their contributions.

"Public service is at the heart of our identity," says Eduardo M. Peñalver, the Allan R. Tessler Dean and Professor of Law, who has made expanding financial aid a priority of his deanship. "The legal profession has as its core a commitment to the rule of law, and at the center of the rule of law is access to justice. Because Cornell is a land-grant institution, public service has always been one of our core values. Recognizing the contributions of students and alumni working in the public interest is a source of great pride, reaffirming our commitment to Cornell lawyers excelling in every corner of the profession."

"We work in the trenches every day, and we never expect anybody to acknowledge what we do," says Betty Barker, a deputy public defender in Northern California's Contra Costa County and 2012 award winner. "We don't expect to be recognized, and in fact, we're almost universally disliked. So it was really moving to me to receive the award-I love what I do, and I do it because I think it's the right thing to do. That's how I want to spend my life, helping make sure the underprivileged can have the best possible defense. And I was so honored to know that Cornell recognizes that as being really important."

2006- ANGELICA "KICA" MATOS '99

When she arrived at Cornell Law School, Angelica "Kica" Matos '99 knew exactly what she was going to do: study hard, become a death penalty lawyer, and move to either Texas or Louisiana to litigate postconviction cases. "But life has a strange way of derailing your best efforts," says Matos, who was working as executive director of New Haven's Junta for Progressive Action when she was included in the first Public Service Awards in 2006.

After working in the Capital Habeas Unit of the Federal Community Defender Office in Philadelphia, Matos met her future husband, moved to New Haven, and needed to find a new practice. Drawing on her background -she grew up in Puerto Rico, Trinidad and Tobago, Fiji, and New Zealand-she gravitated toward immigrant advocacy, first as executive director of Junta, NewHaven's oldest Latino advocacy organization; then as deputy mayor for community services with the city of New Haven; and then with Atlantic Philanthropies, where she headed a Reconciliation and Human Rights Programme that focused on protecting civil liberties, advancing racial justice, abolishing the death penalty, and reforming immigration laws.

In 2012, Matos became director of immigrant rights and racial justice at the Center for Community Change, where she coordinates the work of the Fair Immigration Reform Movement, the nation's largest coalition of state-based immigrant rights organizations, and played a key role in crafting and advancing the national strategy for immigration reform that culminated last November in a pair of executive actions by President Obama, bringing relief to an estimated five million undocumented immigrants.

"It was an exhilarating moment, a victory for the movement, and a great affirmation of the power of community engagement," says Matos, who currently divides her time between New Haven and Washington, D.C. "Don't get me wrong- the work is incredibly hard and the hours are brutal. But there's something deeply rewarding about being engaged in a movement fueled by the voices of those most affected, who also happen to be among the most disenfranchised in this country. I'm constantly awed by the acts of bravery by undocumented immigrants, stepping out to publicly acknowledge their status and fearlessly working to bring about change. That's what inspires me."

2007- DOUGLAS LASDON '81

Three years out of law school, Douglas Lasdon '81 founded the Legal Action Center for the Homeless (LACH) as a one-person operation in an unheated, burned-out building in East Harlem. His goal was to help people at the farthest margins of society, both individually and collectively, by providing outreach at shelters and soup kitchens. Within the next few years, as LACH evolved into the Urban Justice Center, Lasdon and his colleagues expanded that focus, reaching beyond his original vision to include sex workers; survivors of domestic violence; lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth; prisoners; refugees; street vendors; victims of human trafficking; and U.S. military veterans.

"We now have ten projects, 120 staff members, and a budget of over $11 million," says Lasdon. "We've been the driving force behind a lot of systemic advocacy efforts, including class action lawsuits that have made significant changes to the services that poor people use. There have been a lot of those cases, too many to point to, but the single thing I'm proudest of is creating this organization."

In his first case, Palmer v. Cuomo, Lasdon advocated for youth in foster care, who were being denied services as soon as they turned eighteen. InDoe v. City of New York, he established the right for homeless married couples to be housed in shelters together. In Young v. New York City Transit Authority he challenged the ban on begging in the subway system as a violation of the First Amendment. In Tolle v. Dinkins, he forced the city to reduce the legal capacity of its largest shelter from 1,050 to 350 men.

"I love my job," says Lasdon, who also works as an adjunct faculty member at New York University. "I went to law school solely because I wanted to do public interest work, and I finished as a better reader and a better thinker because of that education. It prepared me for the world. It prepared me to be a more effective member of the community, and I'm very happy with the choice I made."

2008- JOE IAROCCI '84

As a student, Joe Iarocci '84 did not foresee winning an award for public service. After graduation, he quickly headed for Big Law, spending five years as an associate at Shearman & Sterling on Wall Street and six years as a partner at Lamar, Archer & Cofrin in Atlanta. But along the way, he changed direction.

"I had a real crisis of meaning," says Iarocci. "I was working at great places and making a ton of money, but it wasn't doing it for me. I went through this period of wondering, 'Is this all there is?' And by some twist of fate and good fortune-partly because of my Cornell education and my experience on Wall Street-I became general counsel at CARE, the poverty-fighting NGO. All of a sudden, everything fell into place."

From general counsel, Iarocci became CFO, then chief of staff, when he received the Law School's Public Service Award, and then interim executive vice president for global advocacy and external relations, with responsibility for guiding the organization's strategic partnerships, marketing, and communications. Over the course of those thirteen years at CARE, Iarocci also found a new passion for leadership development.

"At CARE, I came to see that the solution to any problem in the world-you pick it: climate change, racism, sexism, poverty, hunger- wasn't more money, more technology, or more human resources. It was leadership," says Iarocci.

In 2012, he launched the third stage of his career, becoming CEO of the Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership, a fifty-year-old leadership development nonprofit. In 2014 he founded the Cairnway Center for Servant Leadership Excellence to counsel Fortune 500 clients on best leadership practices. "When a company that's not known for being warm and fuzzy wants to advance servant leadership, and when hardbitten businesspeople come up to you after a conference to say you've changed their lives, it's amazingly gratifying. I've got to tell you, it doesn't get much better than that."

2009- ARTHUR EISENBERG '68

More than forty years into his career at the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), Arthur Eisenberg '68 shows no signs of stopping. These days, he's keeping busiest in a lawsuit where he's asking for the release of grand jury testimony in the choke-hold death of Eric Garner. In a second case, he's trying to negotiate a settlement to bring about affordable and racially integrated housing in Brooklyn, and in a third, he's pursuing federal court litigation against the NYPD for sending undercover agents into mosques and Muslim student organizations in the absence of evidence of criminal misconduct.

"It never gets dull," says Eisenberg, legal director of the NYCLU. "I get to work on a broad variety of issues, but at the end of the day, the thing that really drives me is the capacity to use the litigation process as an instrument of justice, to expand individual liberties and civil rights."

Over the course of his career, Eisenberg has been involved in more than twenty cases presented to the U.S. Supreme Court, serving either as a cocounsel for direct litigants or as a coauthor of briefs on behalf of amici curiae. The cases have included claims that states violate the First Amendment when they deny voters the right to use write-in ballots; that legislatures violate the Fourteenth Amendment when they engage in political gerrymandering; and that a school board violated the First Amendment when, for political reasons, it removed ten books from its school library. The school case, Island Trees Union Free School District v. Pico, is the one he considers his favorite.

"We instinctively believed that what the school board was doing was an act of censorship, but legal doctrine hadn't reached the point where the board's actions could easily fit into areas of First Amendment protection," says Eisenberg. "We were developing new law, and it was perhaps the most interesting example of trying to create legal doctrine where there was virtually no law before we started the litigation."

Eisenberg's broad exposure to a range of constitutional issues has provided him with what he has described as "opportunities to dabble in legal scholarship" by publishing numerous law review articles and essays and by teaching constitutional litigation and civil rights law at University of Minnesota Law School and at Cardozo School of Law. "There are always new issues, new challenges," he insists, "and too much to do to think about retirement."

2010- NICKY GOREN '92

In 2008, after working as a federal government attorney for fourteen years, Nicky Goren '92 decided it was time to leave her comfort zone. Becoming chief of staff at the Corporation for National and Community Service, which administers AmeriCorps, Goren moved into a highly visible, politically charged role at the center of a national debate about the public interest, and found herself using her Cornell Law School education in new ways.

"My law degree is still the foundation of who I am," says Goren, currently president and CEO of the Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Foundation, a major nonprofit funder in Washington, D.C. "That law degree led me to AmeriCorps, where I first worked as associate general counsel, then became chief of staff and then acting CEO, which led to management in the philanthropy sector. That's the door I walked through, and there came a point where it didn't make sense to go back to being a lawyer. So I just built on what I'd done and kept moving forward."

Forward meant leaving a billion-dollar federal agency and entering the nonprofit sector as president of the Washington Area Women's Foundation. For the next four years, Goren focused on learning how to fundraise, building a team, and providing grants to improve the lives of girls and women. Then, with the organization on a stronger footing, Goren moved to Meyer, which broadens the scope of her impact to include hundreds of thousands of children and families in the D.C. region.

"When I graduated from the Law School, I didn't have a plan, but thanks to Dean Lukingbeal, I had some criteria for what I wanted to do," says Goren. "I wanted to be challenged every day. I wanted to work with people that I love and enjoy. I wanted to feel passionate about what I do, to wake up every morning feeling excited to go to work. That's how I made my choices, and somehow, it feels as though every decision led me to this place, which is exactly where I'm meant to be."

2011- MATTHEW D. GLASSER '77

After graduating from law school, Matthew D. Glasser '77 returned to Colorado, unsure of his next step. "I had doubts about whether a traditional legal career would be personally satisfying," says Glasser, who retired last fall at the World Bank's mandatory retirement age of sixty-two. "A lot of people experience tension between what they want to do, what they should do from some moral/ethical point of view, and what they must do to earn a living. When I was in law school, I didn't yet know how to square that circle, but when I look back on my career now, it all looks connected."

At his first job, working for a small firm in Denver, Glasser represented municipalities and water districts, helping structure bond issues and special borrowing. From there, he was appointed city attorney in Broomfield, where he advised the city council, negotiated agreements, and lobbied in Washington for state and local interests. Leaving government service, he became a full-time attorney and lobbyist, securing $80 million for five Colorado municipalities to protect their drinking water supply from contamination by the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant.

In 1997, a reservoir was named in Glasser's honor, but by then, he'd already gone global, working with USAID to advise the government of Ukraine on land and housing issues; counseling the National Treasury of South Africa on municipal finance; and advancing economic development in central Asia, Romania, and Russia. In 2003, he joined the World Bank as an urban legal adviser, supervising projects in India, Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. Then, after eleven years at the World Bank, he celebrated his sixty-second birthday by getting married and preparing to teach his first class at American University's Washington College of Law.

"A good law education prepares you to think in shades, to examine why structures are created to govern society, and to understand what they're intended to accomplish," says Glasser. "Law is about the social engineering of a society. Just as you'd have to study engineering to build a better bridge, you have to study law to build a better society."

2012- BETTY BARKER '89

Before coming to Cornell Law School, Betty Barker '89 knew she wanted to be a litigator. But until she met her first clients at the Cornell Legal Aid Clinic, she didn't know what kind.

"The moment I started working in the clinic, I loved it," says Barker, assistant public defender in Northern California's Contra Costa County. "My first summer, I applied for a job at the clinic, and just fell in love with it, so I took classes in the clinic my second and third years. I was working with indigent people, handling Social Security disability claims, unemployment claims, and lots of evictions. To me, that's what lawyering is all about: fighting for your client in court every day. And that's why I decided to do what I do."

The stakes are high, with Barker defending clients who face either the death penalty or life in prison. In one recent case, she represented a man charged in a widely publicized gang rape at Richmond High School in 2009, who was sentenced to 32 years in prison; in another, she successfully argued that a homicide client was mentally incompetent. The cases are exhausting, and though the hours are long, she's learned to manage the stress and create a balance between work and family.

"We take cases where our clients may get life in prison, and our job is to do everything we can to prevent that from happening," says Barker. "But if it happens, you have to be able to live with that, and there are people who quickly recognize this is not the work for them. You have to be able to manage chaos. And I love chaos-it's like being an ER doctor, and it takes a lot of adrenaline. Every day you walk into work, and you don't know what's going to happen. There's always an emergency; you're never, ever bored. And there are very few lawyers who can say that."

2013- WENDY J. WEINBERG '84

For the first twelve years of her career, Wendy J. Weinberg '84 focused on legal aid, starting in Nassau and Suffolk counties before moving on to Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Baltimore, where she coordinated efforts by the Maryland Coalition for Civil Justice to improve the delivery of legal services to the indigent. It was challenging, satisfying work, building on the experiences she'd had at the Law School's legal aid clinic-until a job opened up in consumer protection, and she took the leap.

"That turned out to be pivotal in my career," says Weinberg, currently an enforcement attorney at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). "I shifted to consumer protection, and I've been there ever since, because I've seen how fundamental this work is. When people are taken advantage of financially, particularly people of limited means, it has enormous consequences. Without money, everything falls apart, and when you're dealing with scams that target people's very last dollar, from credit repair to debt relief to debt collection, it has a devastating impact on people and on society as a whole."

That first pivot to executive director of the National Association of Consumer Agency Administrators was followed six years later by a job as assistant attorney general in the District of Columbia, where Weinberg conducted prosecutions for violations of the Consumer Protection Procedures Act. That led to the Legal Aid Society of the District of Columbia, where she founded a consumer law practice, and to the CFPB, where she currently conducts investigations and enforcement actions against companies, including banks, that provide financial services or products to consumers.

"It's been a fascinating, stimulating experience," says Weinberg. "And a monumental experience, because everyone is impacted by the financial marketplace. Working for the federal government means I'm handling cases that have the capacity to affect a much larger group of individuals, with the potential to make a real difference in people's lives, which is why I began this work in the first place."

2014- CYRUS MEHRI '88

In the years since graduation, Cyrus Mehri '88 has made a name for himself as a tireless litigator, seeking redress for victims of discrimination. He's served as co-lead counsel in some of the most significant race and gender cases in American history, including Roberts v. Texaco Inc. ($176 million) and Ingram v. The Coca-Cola Company ($192 million). But before Workforce magazine called him "Corporate America's scariest opponent," Mehri was simply another 1L, the son of Iranian immigrants trying to find his way. 

"I did a lot of searching in law school, which created a few good leadership opportunities," says Mehri, partner at Mehri & Skalet, who was articles editor on the Cornell International Law Journal. "That first year, I took torts with Professor Henderson and contracts with Professor Summers, studying at the feet of these giants. It was a profound experience, and I came away with a commitment to excellence, which I've tried to carry with me going forward." 

With his "Women on Wall Street Project," Mehri aims to end corporate discrimination in financial institutions; in the "Madison Avenue Project," he's investigating discrimination claims against some of the world's most powerful ad agencies. Most recently, as the NFL's special counsel on social responsibility, he's working with women's rights organizations to develop some new policies, which he expects to announce in the coming months.

"At heart, I'm a reformer, someone who really wants to bring about change for the better," says Mehri. "Every single day, I'm trying to get companies to open their doors, to really take a stand for opportunity, and even though we start as adversaries, a lot of these companies end up becoming our strong allies, because they really embrace what we're trying to do.

"I've been a big fan of these Public Service Awards, and it's been an education to see the amazing things these Cornell students and alumni have been doing in the public interest," he continues. "The night I was given the award, I introduced my dad to the woman who's now my fiancée, and I talked about the work we all do, bringing about systemic change. It was very meaningful, and becoming a part of this ten-year tradition brought a little extra magic to the night."

The Class of 2015

The room was full and the mood celebratory as the Law School hosted its 10th annual Alumni Exemplary Public Service Awards at the Association of the Bar of the City of New York on January 30.

"It's inspiring to see people who have dedicated their careers to representing the indigent, protecting people from crime, and ensuring access to due process," said Eduardo M. Peñalver, the Allan R. Tessler Dean and Professor of Law. "These are people who've made significant sacrifices to practice law on behalf of populations that would otherwise not have access to justice, and when we hear about lawyers doing this kind of work, it makes us proud to be Cornell lawyers."

This 10th anniversary class had nine alumni award winners, with years of public service experience, working with immigrant detainees in federal custody, victims of domestic violence, prisoners on death row, and recipients of Medicare and temporary assistance. There were experts in Native American cultural resources, white-collar fraud prosecution, investigative journalism, and wildlife conservation, all gathered together to be honored for their work. In addition, twelve students received awards for their dedication to public service during their law school careers.

"It's extremely gratifying to be recognized by the Law School," said Nav Dayanand, LL.M. '04, director of federal government relations for the Nature Conservancy, who works closely with Oregon's congressional delegation and federal agencies on environmental policy issues. "It feels significant that I'm only the second recipient with the LL.M. degree to be recognized, and that the work I do is so nontradi- tional. I don't practice law, but I've always used my legal education to work in the public sector. The Law School recognizes the different journey that I'm on, and that speaks volumes."

It was an evening of contrasts, of prosecutors and public defenders sharing stories, and if Dayanand represents working inside the system,Lisa Graves '94 represents the opposite.

"It was a surprise to receive this recognition and be a part of this group," said Graves, who directs the Center for Media and Democracy, a watchdog organization that exposes the impact of corporate wealth on public policy. "I'm really proud of the work we do to shine a light on the powerful interests that diminish our democracy, and to lift up the voices of working Americans. Out of all the schools I could go to, I chose Cornell for its vision of using the law as a tool to reform society, and I'm glad to see the Law School reinvesting in that vision."

It was an emotional evening, and for Comstock and Peck, the high point of the year. "Awards have a positive ripple effect," said Elizabeth Peck, director of public service. "They're like big, beautiful, shiny rocks in a pond, with ripples that keep spreading further and further. They tell stories, and the stories travel back to Ithaca, and to people working at law firms, people who might be inspired by their example. I know that when we see all this good work, it motivates us to keep doing more."

http://forum.lawschool.cornell.edu/Vol41_No1/Feature-4.cfm