Topic to Cover
“2021 Immigration Policy Review”
Biography
Lori A. Nessel’s teaching and scholarship focus largely on the areas of immigration and refugee law and policy, international human rights, rule of law, and access to justice. She is a Professor of Law and served as Director of Seton Hall University School of Law’s Center for Social Justice for fourteen years. She now Directs the Immigrants’ Rights/International Human Rights Clinic and oversees the Law School’s component of the state-wide Detention and Deportation Defense Initiative.
Professor Nessel regularly teaches Immigration and Naturalization Law and the Immigrants’ Rights/International Human Rights Clinic. She has also taught International Human Rights Law, Gender and the Law, Selected Topics in Immigration Law, and Advanced Comparative Issues in Refugee Law. Professor Nessel came to Seton Hall Law School in 1995 after completing a Skadden Arps Public Interest Law Fellowship representing migrant farmworkers in Upstate New York and working at a small civil rights firm in New York City.
In her Immigrants’ Rights/International Human Rights Clinic, Professor Nessel supervises live cases and human rights fact-finding and advocacy projects, including claims under the Refugee and Torture Conventions, as well as cases involving human trafficking, family reunification, and other forms of relief from deportation. Under her supervision, the Clinic has won groundbreaking decisions, including one of the first rulings to recognize domestic violence as torture under the United Nations Convention Against Torture. She is currently supervising students in a human rights project examining private deportations of immigrants by hospitals in the United States.