Professor Jean Koh Peters and Susan Bryant to Be Honored by Society of American Law Teachers
Jean Koh Peters, the Sol Goldman Clinical Professor of Law, and Susan Bryant, professor at CUNY School of Law, will receive the Society of American Law Teachers (SALT) Great Teacher Award at the organization’s annual dinner in January. The award recognizes Peters and Bryant for their teaching and scholarship on clinical pedagogy.
Professors Peters and Bryant have closely collaborated since 1999, when they began work on the Five Habits of Cross-Cultural Lawyering, a curriculum now taught in clinical programs around the country. They have continued this work, both by creating other tools for lawyers wishing to improve their competencies in cross-cultural work and by creating a parallel curriculum for Talking about Race in the Clinical Classroom. They are now exploring how lawyers can constructively raise issues involving race in their client advocacy.
“It has been a privilege of a lifetime as well as a pure joy to converse, work, write, and present with Sue on issues so close to our hearts and of such critical importance to lawyers and their clients,” said Peters, on learning of the award. “We have great respect for SALT and its commitment to social justice, and are humbled by this honor.”
The Society of American Law Teachers is committed to advancing teaching excellence, social justice, and diversity. SALT is a community of progressive law teachers, law school administrators, librarians, academic support experts, students, and affiliates. Its work includes efforts to promote academic freedom and equal opportunity. SALT also organizes several BA to JD Pipeline programs throughout the country, hosts Breaking In programs for legal educators, coordinates a mentor program for faculty, co-sponsors a diversity in law school leadership conference, and hosts its biennial teaching conference. Previous recipients of the Great Teacher Award include the late W. Hayward Burns ’66, Barbara Babcock ’63 LLB, Howard Glickstein ’54 LLB, Phoebe Haddon ’85 LLM, Charles Lawrence ’69, and Stephen Wizner, the William O. Douglas Clinical Professor Emeritus of Law at Yale Law School.
Jean Koh Peters is an expert in children, families, and the law. She joined Yale Law School in 1989 as an associate clinical professor and supervising attorney for The Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization. She was named clinical professor in 1993 and the Sol Goldman Clinical Professor of Law in October 2009. She previously was an assistant clinical professor at Columbia Law School and associate director of Columbia’s Child Advocacy Clinic. Prior to that, she served as a staff attorney in the Juvenile Rights Division of the Legal Aid Society in New York City, after clerking for the late William P. Gray of the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. She currently supervises students representing clients in the Sol and Lillian Goldman Family Advocacy for Children and Youth Clinic and the Immigration Legal Services Clinic.
