Kate Mogulescu

Biography

Professor Kate Mogulescu directs the Criminal Defense & Advocacy Clinic, which she launched in 2017 when she joined the Brooklyn Law School faculty. Her work and scholarship largely examine gender and sentencing in the criminal legal system, with a focus on gender-based violence, intimate partner abuse, sex work and human trafficking. Through the Survivors Justice Project, a grant-funded interdisciplinary collective, the Clinic works with people whose experience with abuse and violence led to their own arrest, prosecution, and punishment.

Before starting the Clinic, Professor Mogulescu worked for many years as a public defender in the Criminal Defense Practice at The Legal Aid Society. There, in 2011, she created the Exploitation Intervention Project to specifically represent both sex workers and criminalized victims of exploitation. She went on to found the Survivor Reentry Project, a national training and technical assistance initiative on post-conviction advocacy for survivors of trafficking, and the Human Trafficking Clemency Initiative for survivors prosecuted federally.

Professor Mogulescu offers critical analysis of carceral approaches to violence and harm. She has served as a speaker and specialist on human trafficking for the U.S. Embassy Public Affairs Section in India, and has also testified before the New York City Council, the New York State Legislature, and the United Nations Human Rights Committee. She regularly trains public defenders, prosecutors, and other members of the legal community and advocates extensively against the criminalization of vulnerable and exploited people. Her scholarship has been published in numerous journals and law reviews including the University of Miami Law Review Caveat, the Florida Law Review, the CUNY Law Review, and the Anti-Trafficking Review. She has also been widely featured in popular media, including an op-ed in The New York Times in 2014 titled “The Super Bowl and Sex Trafficking.” In 2023, the Association of American Law Schools Section on Clinical Legal Section honored Professor Mogulescu with the Shanara Gilbert Award, recognizing her as an emerging clinician committed to teaching and social justice.