Georgetown Law

Professor Gilman has been teaching immigration law courses and clinics for almost 20 years. Since 2007, she has served as Co-Director and Clinical Professor with the Immigration Clinic at the University of Texas School of Law where she also teaches a Refugee Law and Policy seminar. Her teaching, clinic supervision, and scholarship at the University of Texas are focused on representation of migrants in removal proceedings, immigration detention, asylum law, and border policy. Prior to joining the University of Texas, she served as a teaching fellow with the Georgetown Law Center for Applied Legal Studies, where law students represent individuals fleeing persecution as they seek asylum in the United States. She will teach with the Center for Applied Legal Studies as a visiting faculty member for the Spring 2025 and Spring 2026 semesters.

Professor Gilman received her law degree from Columbia University School of Law and served on the Law Review. She received her undergraduate degree with honors in political science from Northwestern University and also has an LLM from Georgetown Law. Professor Gilman clerked for Judge Thomas M. Reavley, at the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

Professor Gilman has written and practiced extensively in the international human rights and immigrants’ rights fields. Professor Gilman’s scholarship includes: Making Protection Unexceptional: A Reconceptualization of the U.S. Asylum System, 55 Loy. U. Chi. L. J. 1 (2023); Immigration Detention, Inc., 6 J. Migration & Hum. Sec. 145 (2018) (peer-reviewed) (co-authored with Luis A. Romero); The Unending Floods: Disaster Recovery and Immigration Policy, 96 Tex. L. Rev. Online 91 (2018) (co-authored with Elissa Steglich); To Loose the Bonds: The Deceptive Promise of Freedom from Pretrial Immigration Detention, 92 Indiana L.J. 157 (2016). Professor Gilman has published opinion pieces and has been quoted widely, including in The New York Times, USA Today, NPR, and Spectrum News.

Professor Gilman has been appointed by the President of the American Bar Association to serve as a member/advisor of the ABA Commission on Immigration for multiple terms. Among other honors, in 2021, Casa Marianella honored Professor Gilman and the Immigration Clinic with its Ed Wendler Award for Outstanding Service to the Immigrant Community. In 2005, she received the Community Outreach Recognition and Opportunity (“CORO”) Award from the D.C. Court of Appeals. In 2003, Professor Gilman received an “Excellence in Lawyering” award from the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Professor Gilman is a founding member of the board of the newly-formed Texas Immigration Law Center and has served on the board of the Central American Resource Center in Washington, D.C. as well. She is a member of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. She is fluent in Spanish.

Before entering academia, from 2000 to 2005, Professor Gilman was Director of the Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project at the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs where she coordinated the representation of political asylum applicants by pro bono attorneys and engaged in advocacy and litigation on issues of significance to the newcomer community. From 1995-2000, Professor Gilman served as Human Rights Specialist at the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights at the Organization of American States and then Director of the Mexico Project at Human Rights First.