Philip G. Schrag

Director, Center for Applied Legal Studies and Delaney Family Professor of Public Interest Law; A.B., Harvard; LL.B., Yale

     Professor Schrag teaches Civil Procedure and directs the Center for Applied Legal Studies, in which students represent refugees from persecution who are seeking asylum in the United States. He is also the Director of the Public Interest Law Scholars Program, through which selected law students who plan careers as public interest lawyers receive scholarship grants and special academic enrichment and guidance in that field. Before joining the Law Center faculty in 1981, he was assistant counsel to the NAACP Legal Defense Educational Fund, Consumer Advocate of the City of New York, a professor at Columbia University Law School, and Deputy General Counsel of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, from which he received a Meritorious Honor Award in 1981. Professor Schrag has also had a distinguished and varied career in civic service, which has included positions as a delegate to the District of Columbia Statehood Constitutional Convention in 1982, an editor and consultant on consumer protection during the Carter-Mondale transition, a consultant to the New York State Consumer Protection Board, a consultant to the Governor's Advisory Council of Puerto Rico, and an Academic Specialist for the United States Information Agency in the Czech Republic and Hungary. In addition, he drafted New York City's Consumer Protection Act of 1969. He is also a prolific author, having written dozens of articles on consumer law, nuclear arms control, political asylum, and various other topics for both law journals and popular publications. He is the author of fourteen books, including Reflections on Clinical Legal Education (with Michael Meltsner, 1998), Asylum Denied: A Refugee’s Struggle for Safety in America (with David Ngaruri Kenney, 2008); and Refugee Roulette: Disparities in Asylum Adjudication and Proposals for Reform (with Jaya Ramji-Nogales and Andrew I. Schoenholtz, 2009).

Publications

David Koplow

Director, Center for Applied Legal Studies and Professor of Law; B.A., Harvard; Queen's College, Oxford, England; J.D., Yale

     Professor Koplow has worked, taught, and written in the areas of public international law and national security law for many years. He served in government as Attorney-Advisor, and as Special Assistant to the Director of the U.S. Arm Control and Disarmament Agency from 1978 to 1981; as Deputy General Counsel for International Affairs at the U.S. Department of Defense from 1997 to 1999; and as Special Counsel for Arms Control to the General Counsel of the Department of Defense from 2009 to 2011. He has taught at the Georgetown University Law Center since 1981. His principal courses have been International Law I (the introductory survey of public international law topics) and a seminar in the area of arms control, nonproliferation, and terrorism. In addition, he directs a clinic, the Center for Applied Legal Studies, in which students provide pro bono representation to refugees who seek asylum in the United States because of persecution in their homelands. He is a graduate of Harvard College and the Yale Law School. Much of his scholarly writing concentrates on the intersection between international law and U.S. constitutional law, especially in the areas of arms control and national security and treaty negotiation, interpretation, and implementation. 

Publications

Heidi Altman, Fellow

     Heidi Altman came to Georgetown from the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem (NDS), a holistic public defender office in New York City where she created an in-house immigration services project which is now a permanent program at NDS.  At NDS, Heidi provided consultations on immigration consequences of crimes to defense attorneys and clients, and provided direct representation on a variety of immigration matters. 

     Heidi graduated from New York University School of Law, has a Master’s degree in International Affairs from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, and received her Bachelor’s degree from Yale College.  Prior to law school, Heidi worked as a program associate in the Asylum Legal Representation Project at Human Rights First. 

Geoffrey Heeren, Fellow

    Before joining Georgetown, Geoffrey Heeren worked for ten years as a public interest attorney in Chicago. Most recently, he was a Senior Attorney with the Immigration Project of the Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago (LAF), where he handled a wide range of cases involving indigent immigrants, from administrative applications for asylum to petitions for review to the Circuit Court of Appeals. He specialized in representing detained immigrants, particularly those held in long-term detention, and he litigated a number of federal cases involving the constitutional rights of detainees. While working at LAF, he also served as chair of the Chicago Chapter Litigation Committee of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, on the Board of Governors of the Chicago Council of Lawyers, and taught as an adjunct professor of asylum law at the University of Chicago Law School. He graduated from New York University School of Law and received his undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago.