Deborah Epstein
Director, Professor of Law

     Professor Epstein has been teaching the Domestic Violence Clinic since 1993, and has spent almost 20 years working as an advocate for victims of family abuse. She co-chaired the recent design and implementation of the D.C. Superior Court's Domestic Violence Court, which has fundamentally restructured the way civil and criminal family abuse cases are handled. Specialized judges preside over all family law, civil protection order, and criminal cases involving domestic abuse; a multi-agency approach is employed to decrease the incidence of family violence and to improve litigants' access to crucial legal, medical, and social services. Untill 2000, Professor Epstein directed the court's new Domestic Violence Intake Center, a "one-stop shopping" center where victims can obtain assistance and advocacy in their civil and criminal court cases as well as crisis intervention counseling and support.

     Professor Epstein's publications in this area include: Effective Intervention in Domestic Violence Cases: Rethinking the Roles of Prosecutors, Judges, and the Court System, 11 Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 3 (1999); Publicizing Private Violence: Restructuring the Justice System's Approach to Intimate Abuse, 1 Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law 127 (Summer 1999); D.C. Superior Court Domestic Violence Benchbook (1997); Domestic Violence, D.C. Practice Manual (forthcoming, 2000); Litigating CPO Cases: A Practice Manual (1995); and Fighting Domestic Violence in the Nation's Capital, 3 Georgetown Journal of Fighting Poverty 93 (Fall 1995). A more complete publications list is also available.

     Professor Epstein is a member of the D.C. Superior Court's Domestic Violence Coordinating Council, the D.C. Mayor's Commission on Violence Against Women, the National Academy of Sciences Committee on the Training Needs of Health Professionals to Respond to Family Violence, and the D.C. Domestic Violence Fatality Review Team, and has served as a Board Member of the D.C. Coalition Against Domestic Violence.

Laurie S. Kohn
Co-Director, Visiting Professor of Law

     Since 1998 Professor Kohn has supervised students representing victims of domestic violence, co-taught the clinic seminar, and litigated domestic violence and criminal contempt cases. Professor Kohn was the 1998-1999 Women's Law and Public Policy Fellow placed in the Domestic Violence Clinic.

    Professor Kohn has written several practice documents on representing victims of domestic violence including an updated practice manual entitled Litigating Civil Protection Order Cases: a Practice Manual. Professor Kohn's publications include “Barriers to Reliable Credibility Assessments: Domestic Violence Victim-Witnesses,” 11 Am. U.J. Gender Soc. Pol'y & L. 733 (2003), "Why Doesn't She Leave? The Collision of First Amendment Rights and Effective Court Remedies for Victims of Domestic Violence," 29 Hast.Con. Law Quart. 1 (2001); and "Infecting Attorney-Client Confidentiality: The Ethics of HIV Disclosure," 9 Geo. J. Leg. Ethics 547 (1996).

    Prior to joining the faculty of the Domestic Violence Clinic, Professor Kohn was an associate at the D.C. law firm of Crowell & Moring where she specialized in medical malpractice and insurance coverage litigation. Before entering private practice, Professor Kohn focused on disability rights, assisting in the legislative process of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in Senator Kennedy's office, and later in the regulatory drafting and implementation phase of the ADA in the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice. Professor Kohn also worked at the legislative office of the American Civil Liberties Union, focusing on reproductive rights and disability policy.

    Professor Kohn was appointed by the Mayor to the D.C. Fatality Review Commission and serves as a hearing officer in police misconduct cases for the Office of Police Complaints. In addition, Professor Kohn is the Chair of the steering committee of the D.C. Bar Family Law Section and serves on the boards of the D.C. Coalition Against Domestic Violence and the Abramson Foundation. She is the Co-Chair of the Domestic Violence Unit Task Force of D.C. Superior Court. Professor Kohn has appeared on radio programs and in symposia on domestic violence around the country. Professor Kohn attended HarvardCollege and received her JD and LL.M. degrees from GeorgetownUniversityLawCenter.

Ann Cammett
Teaching Fellow      

     Ann Cammett graduated from the School of Visual Arts, where she earned a B.F.A. with honors and launched a distinguished career as an art director servicing advocates for civil, women’s, LGBT, and other human rights. Ann received her J.D. from the City University of New York Law School in 2000, and was named the Public Interest Law Association’s Student of the Year. At CUNY Ann was a student lawyer in the Battered Women’s Rights Clinic, focusing on the special concerns of battered women in prison, and was also designated a Thurgood Marshall fellow to the civil rights committee of the New York City Bar Association, concentrating on the class and race dimensions of child removals to foster care. After law school Ann was awarded a Skadden Fellowship at the Legal Aid Society of New York, where she represented formerly incarcerated women in civil cases, and created a project to provide reentry services to those facing civil sanctions arising from their criminal convictions. Prior to becoming a fellow at Georgetown's Domestic Violence Clinic, Ann was a policy analyst at the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice where she provided community education and helped design model programs to aid in more positive reentry outcomes for returning prisoners and their communities. Ann is currently a Board Member at the Center for Constitutional Rights.      

Erin Aslan
Teaching Fellow

     Erin Aslan received a B.A. with honors in Hemispheric Studies: The Americas; Race, Class, and Cultural Identity from Brown University in 1996.  She was awarded a J.D. with honors in 2003 from New York University School of Law, where she was a Root-Tilden-Kern Scholar and recipient of the Ann Petluck Poses Memorial Prize based on her work in the Comparative Criminal Justice Clinic: Focus on Domestic Violence.  As part of the Clinic, Erin helped represent a woman charged with homicide after she killed her abusive boyfriend in self-defense.  During law school, Erin served as a courtroom advocate for women seeking restraining orders, interned with a domestic violence prosecution office, and helped prepare an asylum application based on the state’s failure to protect the applicant from recurring family violence.  In 2004, Erin clerked for the Honorable Harold Baer, Jr. in the Southern District of New York and was hired by the U.S. Department of Justice through the Attorney General’s Honors Program.  Following her clerkship, Erin worked as a Trial Attorney with DOJ’s Public Integrity Section, where she investigated and prosecuted allegations of public corruption, including bribery, fraud, and conflicts of interest, and prosecuted misdemeanors in the Superior Court of D.C. on behalf of the U.S. Attorney’s Office.  Before law school, Erin investigated complaints of police misconduct with the Civilian Complaint Review Board in New York City.    

 

Revised August 15, 2007 (MA)