Professor Abbe Smith Honored by NYU School of Law

April 19, 2012 —

Georgetown University Law Center Professor Abbe Smith has been selected as the 2012 recipient of the Legal Teaching Award from New York University School of Law.

Established in 2005, the Legal Teaching Award "recognizes great teachers for scholarship and for extraordinary dedication to the education and training of law students." It is presented each year to an NYU Law alumnus who is celebrating a reunion. Smith, who graduated from NYU Law in 1982, is in her 30th reunion year.

Smith is the director of the Criminal Defense & Prisoner Advocacy Clinic and co-director of the E. Barrett Prettyman Fellowship and Stuart Stiller Post-Graduate Fellowship Program at Georgetown Law, where she joined the full-time faculty in 1996. From 1990 to 1996, she taught at Harvard Law, where she was education director and then deputy director of the Criminal Justice Institute. She has also taught at City University of New York School of Law, Temple University School of Law and American University Washington College of Law. In 2005 to 2006, Smith was a Senior Fulbright Scholar at the University of Melbourne Law School in Australia. From 1982 to 1990, she was a trial attorney with the Defender Association of Philadelphia.

Smith writes and teaches on criminal defense, legal ethics, juvenile justice and clinical legal education. In addition to numerous law journal articles, she is the author of Case of a Lifetime: A Criminal Defense Lawyer's Story (Palgrave MacMillan, 2008) and Understanding Lawyers' Ethics (with Monroe Freedman, 4th edition 2010). She continues to be actively engaged in indigent defense as both a clinical supervisor and member of the Criminal Justice Act panel for the D.C. Superior Court, and frequently presents at public defender and legal aid training programs in the U.S. and abroad.