Professor Muneer I. Ahmad Honored by Connecticut Bar Association

Professor Muneer I. Ahmad will be awarded the Tapping Reeve Legal Educator Award by the Connecticut Bar Association (CBA). 

Ahmad, the Sol Goldman Clinical Professor of Law and co-director of the Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic (WIRAC), will receive the award on March 12, 2026, as part of the CBA’s annual awards ceremony. 

Established in 2012, the Tapping Reeve Legal Educator Award is presented to a member of the CBA who is a member of the faculty, a clinical instructor, or an adjunct instructor who has contributed greatly to the legal education of his or her colleagues. 

Past recipients of the award include the late J.L. Pottenger Jr. ’75 (2022) and Lafayette S. Foster Professor of Law Kate Stith (2018).

Ahmad and his WIRAC students represent individuals, groups, and organizations in litigation and nonlitigation matters involving immigration, immigrant rights, labor, and the intersections among them. The clinic’s work has included litigation to challenge the rescission of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, obtaining the first nationwide injunction against the first travel ban from majority-Muslim countries, representation of numerous detained immigrants in habeas corpus proceedings, and advocacy on behalf of community- and membership-based organizations in Connecticut. Ahmad previously led the Transnational Development Clinic, in which he and his students developed strategies for U.S.-based lawyers to engage effectively in global poverty work. He has represented immigrants in labor, immigration, and trafficking matters, as well as the representation of a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay for three years. 

In 2023–24, he served as a senior advisor to the U.S. Secretary of Labor, where he helped to coordinate work related to immigration and labor and the impact of AI on workers. Ahmad has also served on the Access to Justice Commissions for Connecticut and the District of Columbia. 

Before joining Yale Law School, Ahmad was a member of the faculty at American University Washington College of Law and served as a Skadden Fellow and staff attorney at the Asian Pacific American Legal Center in Los Angeles. He clerked for Hon. William K. Sessions III of the U.S. District Court for the District of Vermont.