Professor Schrag teaches Professional Responsibility and co-directs the Center for Applied Legal Studies, in which students represent refugees from persecution who are seeking asylum in the United States. He has also taught civil procedure, administrative law, legislation, and consumer protection law. He served for 21 years as 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 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, 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 seventeen books, including The End of Asylum (with Andrew I. Schoenholtz and Jaya Ramji-Nogales 2021),
Baby Jails: The Fight to End the Incarceration of Refugee Children in America (2020);
Ethical Problems in the Practice of Law (6^th edition 2023, with Lisa G. Lerman and Robert Rubinson);
Lives in the Balance: Asylum Adjudication by the Department of Homeland Security (with Jaya Ramji-Nogales and Andrew I. Schoenholtz, 2014);
Refugee Roulette: Disparities in Asylum Adjudication and Proposals for Reform (with Jaya Ramji-Nogales and Andrew I. Schoenholtz, 2009);
Asylum Denied: A Refugee’s Struggle for Safety in America (with David Ngaruri Kenney, 2008); A Well-founded Fear: The Congressional Battle to Save Political Asylum in America; and
Reflections on Clinical Legal Education (with Michael Meltsner, 1998). He has been honored with Georgetown University’s Presidential Award for Distinguished Teacher/Scholars; Equal Justice Works’s Outstanding Law Faculty Member Award for leadership in nurturing a spirit of public service in legal education and beyond; Lexis/Nexis’s Daniel Levy Memorial Award for outstanding achievement in immigration Law; and the Association of American Law Schools William Pincus Award for service to clinical legal education and its Deborah L. Rhode Award for contributions to increasing pro bono and public service opportunities in law schools through scholarship, service, and leadership.