Professor Susan Hazeldean to receive LGBTQ+ Inclusive Excellence Award from AALS
Professor Susan Hazeldean, founder and director of the Brooklyn Law School LGBT Advocacy Clinic, will receive the inaugural LGBTQ+ Inclusive Excellence Award from the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Issues Section. The award will be presented at the AALS Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., in January.
Hazeldean’s teaching, scholarship, and law practice focus on gender, sexual orientation, immigration, and civil rights. Under her direction, students in the LGBT Advocacy Clinic represent clients who face discrimination based on their sexual orientation or gender identity. The clinic has achieved significant and historic victories, including a $100,000 settlement for a transgender woman who was raped by an inmate in a New York State prison after corrections officers failed to take reasonable steps to protect her from sexual assault. Clinic students also won asylum for a gay man from Africa who had faced brutal lifelong persecution because of his sexual orientation.
“We are thrilled to congratulate Professor Hazeldean on this richly deserved honor,” said Professor Stacy Caplow, Associate Dean of Experiential Education. “Since she joined the Law School just three years ago, she has proven herself to be an exceptional leader in advancing LGBTQ+ rights and clinical education and makes it clear to our students, faculty, and staff that inclusion of LGBTQ+ people is a vital part of our mission at Brooklyn Law School. It is wonderful that with this award, the national community will now know more about her important work.”
Previously, Hazeldean taught at Cornell Law School, where she directed the LGBT clinic. She has also taught at Yale Law School, where she served as a Robert M. Cover Fellow in the Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic. At Yale, she supervised students who represented immigrants and low-wage workers in civil rights actions and engaged in policy work and community-based advocacy. Prior to her academic career, Hazeldean directed the Peter Cicchino Youth Project at the Urban Justice Center in New York, providing free legal representation to homeless and at-risk LGBT youth in matters related to immigration, foster care, public benefits, and family law.
Hazeldean’s most recent article “Privacy as Pretext,” in which she uses legal privacy theory to argue that allowing transgender people into gendered facilities does not undermine privacy in any legally cognizable sense, is forthcoming in the Cornell Law Review.