Lenni B. Benson

Adjunct Professor of Law

Office:	New York Law School 185 West Broadway New York NY 10013
Tel:	(212) 431-2336
Email:	Lenni.benson@nyls.edu

Professor Lenni B. Benson has been teaching and writing in the field of immigration law since 1994. She is a professor at New York Law School and serves as the director of the NYLS Safe Passage Project, a project based learning course that helps students counsel unaccompanied immigrant youth and finds pro bono counsel willing to represent these children. In the fall of 2012 she will become the Chair of the Immigration and Nationality Law Committee for the Association of the Bar of the City of New York. In 2011-2012 she served as a consultant/researcher for the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS). With Russell Wheeler of the Brookings Institution, she prepared a comprehensive report on ways to improve removal adjudication and that report resulted in a formal adoption of over thirty-eight recommendations by ACUS. She is the past chair of the AALS Immigration Law Section and past immigration committee chair for the ABA Section on Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice. Prior to joining academia, she practiced immigration law as a partner in the Los Angeles office of Bryan Cave, LLP. She is a native Arizonan and earned her law degree at the Arizona State College of Law in 1983. She has been an adjunct professor at Columbia teaching both immigration law and a seminar on refugee law. Professor Benson is an emeritus trustee of the American Immigration Law Foundation (now the American Immigration Council) and is a fellow of the American Bar Foundation. Until 2012, she was a member of the LexisNexis Faculty Advisory Board. For many years she has served on the Board of the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law. With several co-authors, she is completing a book for LexisNexis entitled “Immigration and Nationality Law: Problems and Strategies.” She has served as an expert witness on immigration law topics in administrative, civil, and criminal litigation.