Professor Philip Schrag Receives Clinical Legal Education Award

November 27, 2012 —

Professor Philip Schrag

In recognition of his commitment to clinical legal education, Georgetown University Law Center Professor Philip Schrag has been chosen as the 2013 recipient of the William Pincus Award by the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Section on Clinical Legal Education. The award will be presented during the AALS annual meeting in New Orleans in January.

“Phil Schrag is a most-deserving recipient of the Pincus Award,” said Notre Dame Law Professor and Associate Dean Robert Jones, chair of the AALS Section on Clinical Legal Education. “Phil has devoted a tremendous amount of time and effort over many years to supporting clinicians and promoting clinical legal education, and he has served as a mentor to an entire generation of clinical professors. His dedication has been nothing short of inspiring.” 

In selecting Schrag, the awards committee cited his “extraordinary contributions in the realms of scholarship, program design and implementation, elevation of the status of clinicians, mentoring clinical professors and advancement of the cause of justice.” 

The Pincus Award is the highest award bestowed by AALS in the area of clinical legal education. Schrag is the third Georgetown Law professor to receive the prestigious award. The late Professor William Greenhalgh and Professor Wally Mlyniec were also selected as recipients.

Schrag is the Delaney Family Professor of Public Interest Law and director of the Center for Applied Legal Studies at Georgetown Law. He is an expert in clinical education, immigration law, and the legal profession and professional ethics.

Before joining the Law Center faculty in 1981, he was assistant counsel to the NAACP Legal Defense and 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. 

Schrag has been a longtime advocate for law students who wish to pursue public interest careers.  His work was instrumental to the passage of the student loan forgiveness program for public service employees that Congress included in the College Cost Reduction and Access Act, passed and signed into law in 2007.

Schrag has also worked tirelessly on behalf of refugees seeking political asylum in the United States. He is the co-author of Asylum Denied: A Refugee’s Struggle for Safety in America (2008) and Refugee Roulette: Disparities in Asylum Adjudication and Proposals for Reform (2009).

Schrag, who is the author or co-author of 14 books, has also published A Well-Founded Fear: the Congressional Battle to Save Political Asylum in America (1999) and Ethical Problems in the Practice of Law (3d. ed. 2012).

In 2008, Schrag received numerous awards, including the AALS Deborah L. Rhode Award for contributions to public interest law, the Equal Justice Works Outstanding Law Faculty Award and the Lexis/Nexis Daniel Levy Memorial Award for his immigration law work.