Phil Schrag Named to Professorship

Earlier this week, Georgetown Uniiversity Law Center announced the appointment of Georgetown Law Professor Philip Schrag to the newly established Delaney Family Professorship in Public Interest Law. He will be formally installed in a ceremony at the Law Center on September 23.  Schrag is the director of the Center for Applied Legal Studies. Schrag has been a longtime advocate for law students who wish to pursue public interest careers. His work was instrumental to the passage of the student loan forgiveness program for public service employees that Congress included in the College Cost Reduction and Access Act, passed and signed into law in 2007.

Schrag also has also been a tireless advocate on behalf of refugees seeking political asylum in the United States. Last year, Schrag and his former client, David Ngaruri Kenney (a previous ImmigrationProf Immigrant of the Day), published, Asylum Denied: A Refugee’s Struggle for Safety in America (University of California Press, 2008), the chilling story of Kenney’s attempt to escape persecution in his native Kenya and gain asylum in this country.  On September 1, New York University Press published Schrag’s latest book, Refugee Roulette: Disparities in Asylum Adjudication and Proposals for Reform, co-authored with Georgetown Law Visiting Professor Andrew I. Schoenholtz and Temple University Beasley School of Law Professor Jaya Ramji-Nogales.  The book is an expanded version of their 2007 Stanford Law Review article, “Refugee Roulette,” which uncovered immense disparities in refugee adjudications in U.S. immigration agencies and courts. The authors demonstrated that the outcome of an asylum case depends to a great extent on the personality, background and prior experience of the adjudicator, rather than the merits of the claim. A story about the study appeared on the front page of the New York Times on May 31, 2007.

Schrag is the author of fourteen books, including A Well-Founded Fear: the Congressional Battle to Save Political Asylum in America (1999) and Ethical Problems in the Practice of Law (Aspen, 2d. ed. 2002), co-authored with his wife, Professor Lisa Lerman. In 2008, Schrag was recognized for his contributions to public interest law with the Deborah L. Rhode Award from the Association of American Law Schools and the Equal Justice Works Outstanding Law School Faculty Award. In honor of his immigration law work, he received the Daniel Levy Memorial Award from Lexis/Nexis.

CONGRATS PHIL!

KJ