Sameer Ashar Honored with the Association of American Law Schools’ clinical section scholarship award

Professor Sameer Ashar, UCLA School of Law’s vice dean of experiential education, has been honored with the inaugural Ellmann Memorial Clinical Scholarship Award from the Association of American Law Schools’ clinical section.

The award is presented to “scholars and teachers who have dedicated their careers to clinical and experiential teaching, whose written body of work evinces a concern for justice and a commitment to healing the world, and whose body of work emanates from [their] clinical commitments.” Ashar will be celebrated during an online ceremony on May 27.

A member of the UCLA Law faculty Ashar is a national leader in experiential legal education who focuses on advocacy on behalf of marginalized communities. He teaches UCLA Law’s Workers, Law, and Organizing Clinic and the Immigrant Family Legal Clinic. Under his leadership, UCLA Law has honed its experiential offerings to both train advocates in service to the broader community and advance clinical pedagogy, an area of legal education that UCLA Law helped pioneer in the 1970s.

Ashar has written some wonderful immigrant rights movement scholarship, including Movement Lawyers in the Fight for Immigrant Rights, 64 UCLA Law Review 1464 (2017). Full Text and Immigration Enforcement and Subordination: The Consequences of Racial Profiling After September 11, 34 Connecticut Law Review 1185 (2002). Reprinted, 23 Immigration And Nationality Law Review 545 (2003). Full Text.

KJ