This website represents years of our grateful collaboration with each other and many others whom we would like to acknowledge here.

The ideas in this website grew from our clinical teaching at CUNY Law School and Yale Law School over our decades of teaching. We are so grateful to all of our clients, who made our work so compelling and dear over the years.  We were so fortunate to have our CUNY and Yale colleagues and students gamely try out our ideas over the years, in formal and informal settings.  Every year we had the opportunity to work with these ideas with our national clinical colleagues at the American Association of Law Schools Section on Clinical Legal Education annual conference, and we have priceless memories of plane flights, hotel coffee shops, and ball rooms exploring these ideas with each other and then with our prized fellow teachers right as the school year ended each year.  We also had the great good fortune, separately and together, to share and refine these ideas at presentations to legal aid and legal services organizations, public interest groups, the Refugee, Asylum and International Operations Directorate of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, judges, bar associations and other law schools.

We each were so fortunate to collaborate closely with other teachers and writers throughout our scholarship.  We particularly thank our co-authors:  Mark Weisberg, Elliott Milstein, Ann Shalleck, Conrad Johnson for hours and years of thoughtful conversation and friendship.

The core of the website took shape in Fall 2018 in Jean’s final seminar in law teaching, the Clinical Teaching Practicum.  Law Students learned the materials, taught them in a seminar to ten of their classmates, and synopsized the materials for this site.  We thank Eric Baudry, Peter Beck, Adrian Gonzalez, Matt Nguyen, Mariana Olaizola Rosenblat and Chelsea Shaffer for their drafting and synthesizing many of our earlier writings into summary webpages linked to teaching and reading materials.  We also thank Anna Funtelar, Becky Gendelman, Healy Ko, Edgar Melgar and Bina Peltz, who served as research assistants and also taught segments in the seminar, and collaborated closely on the seminar and reviewed drafted posts throughout the Fall.   Alden Pinkham provided first-rate feedback from the perspective of an experienced clinic student and likely future clinical teacher reading the materials for the first time.  Jean truly never dreamed how joyful, meaningful, beautiful and fun a semester of talking with committed clinic students about teaching could be.  Matthew Routh and Cara McClellan provided earlier research assistance on this website.  We also are grateful to Joanne Lee and Kathy Lu who, along with Becky and Bina, helped Jean initially envision and design the seminar in the Spring of 2018.  We look forward to the future teaching careers of these innovative, talented and generous collaborators.

Yale Law School offered critical administrative and technical support to the project.  Since 1989, the Law School, and Deans Guido Calabresi, Anthony Kronman, Harold Koh, Kate Stith, Robert Post and Heather Gerken have generously and without fail provided Jean the wherewithal to work with generations of talented research assistants in weekly meetings which slowly grew all of her writing and teaching ideas relayed here.   The Lillian Goldman Law Library and the Law School’s Librarian, Teresa Miguel-Stearns, along with Jason Eiseman, offered enthusiastic support and invaluable weekly assistance throughout the entire seminar and initial website creation.  Randy Derrick provided the critical bridge from our drafting to website posting and functionality for every page.  Trip Kirkpatrick at the Yale University Library designed the site and instantly and constantly provided technical help, large and small, throughout the initial website’s birth.  Debbie Tropiano supported the seminar and Jean every hour of the semester.

CUNY also provided support and encouragement necessary to produce the Habits as well as the Purple Book – Transforming Legal Education: the Theory and Practice of Clinical Pedagogy.  Deans Haywood Burns, Kristin Booth Glen, Michelle Anderson, and MaryLu Bilek have supported Sue’s work. Sue is especially grateful to Donna Lee, Maria Arias, Carmen Huertas, her co-teachers in clinics at CUNY who were committed colleagues in exploring issues of race, culture and language as it challenged and informed our work as lawyers on behalf of clients. Sue was privileged to work at one of the most diverse law school in the United States and learned daily from her colleagues, students and staff who shared their insights and experiences.  She especially thanks CUNY students Nicole Faut and Mathew Routh for their research work on Talking about Race.

Finally, and most fervently, we thank our families for nurturing us and nurturing these ideas with us.  Jean thanks Liz, Chris and Alex for their sincere and enlivening interest in these ideas, and Jim for decades of daily generous and ever loving support of both the heart and the logistics of the work.   Sue thanks Alison, Zach and Zach – my children, friends, and fellow travelers in working to make the world more just. To Cairo & Gus, who are as Jean would say, my true “things of beauty,” you are the best distraction from work a grandma could possibly have. Finally, to Larry who for the last 45 years has been our best cheerleader, providing loving support and appreciation of our work.