Susan L. Brooks

Associate Dean for Experiential Learning
Professor of Law

Biography

Susan L. Brooks is a pioneer in the emerging field of therapeutic jurisprudence. She is also an expert on experiential learning, family law and children’s rights.

Professor Brooks came to the law school from the faculty of the Vanderbilt University Law School. She was a co-founder of the Tennessee Relative Caregiver Coalition and the Tennessee Association of Professional Mediators and served as lead investigator for Tennessee’s Court Improvement Program and as a principal investigator on an Immigrant Community Assessment sponsored by Metropolitan Nashville.

After clerking for the Hon. Bernard A. Friedman of U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, she practiced with Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal in Chicago.

Professor Brooks co-edited the second edition of "Clinical Anthology: Readings for Live-Client Clinics," with Alex Hurder, Frank Bloch and Susan Kay. Her publication “Meeting the Professional Identity Challenge in Legal Education Through a Relationship-Centered Experiential Curriculum” will appear in the University of Baltimore Law Review, and “Epistemology and Ethics in Relationship-Centered Legal Education and Practice,” (with Robert Madden), is forthcoming in the New York Law School Law Review. She co-edited "Relationship-Centered Lawyering: Social Science Theory for Transforming Legal Practice" with R.G. Madden in 2009. Her scholarly publications also include "Trying Differently: A Relationship-Centered Approach to Representing Clients with Cognitive Challenges," (with David M. Boulding) in the International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, "Representing Children in Families," in the Nevada Law Journal, and "Clinical Anthology: Readings for Live-Client Clinics," a textbook that she co-edited. She also contributed chapters in "The Affective Assistance of Counsel" and in "Creative Child Advocacy: Global Perspectives," which she co-edited.

She was a case worker for Jewish Family and Community Service in Chicago before earning her J.D. at New York University School of Law, where she was note and comment editor for the New York University Law Review and received the Judge Aileen Haas Schwartz Award for outstanding work in the field of children and the law.

Professor Brooks is a member of the Global Alliance for Justice Education.

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