Professor Jean Koh Peters to Discuss Dignity, Voice, Story in Jan. 24 Inaugural Lecture

Jean Koh Peters will present her inaugural lecture as the Sol Goldman Clinical Professor of Law on Monday, January 24, 2011, at 4:30 p.m. in Room 127. Her lecture is titled “Dignity, Voice, Story” and is free and open to the public. A reception will follow in the Alumni Reading Room.

"Throughout the young histories of my three fields, representing children, representing refugees, and clinical law teaching, we have sought to respect the dignity, magnify the voices, and remain true to the authentic stories of our clients," said Peters. "Looking back, we can trace how these three imperatives have guided and molded our work, but also, to our surprise, occasionally led us in divergent, even contradictory directions. Looking forward, these three imperatives continue to point the way towards principled and concrete progress for our advocacy and teaching, and for our clients."

An expert in children, families, and the law, Peters 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 was named 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.

Peters has published numerous articles and is author of the book, Representing Children in Child Protective Proceedings: Ethical and Practical Dimensions, now in its third edition. She is the co-author, with Mark Weisberg of Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, of A Teacher’s Reflection Book: Stories, Exercises, Invitations, forthcoming this year from Carolina Academic Press. Peters is also the co-creator, with Susan J. Bryant of CUNY School of Law, of the Habits of Cross-Cultural Lawyering, a curriculum now taught in law school clinics around the country. Peters and Bryant are currently writing a chapter following up on the Habits after a decade; this chapter will be published in a forthcoming anthology on clinical pedagogy.

She holds a B.A. magna cum laude from Radcliffe and a J.D. from Harvard.

The Sol Goldman Clinical Professorship was established in 2008 by a gift from the Sol Goldman Charitable Trust, to support teaching and research activities associated with the professorship.