LL.M., Georgetown Law, 2012
J.D., Columbia Law School, 2003
A.B., Princeton University, 1998
Civil Access to Justice
State Courts and Procedure
Criminal Law
Juvenile Justice
Empirical Research
Clinical Pedagogy
Colleen Shanahan ’03 is recognized nationally for her innovative approach to clinical pedagogy as both a teacher and a scholar. Her research focuses on lawyerless courts, access to justice, and empirical studies of state civil courts.
As the founder of Columbia Law School’s Community Advocacy Lab, Shanahan guides students in partnering with community organizations to advance racial and economic justice in the criminal and civil legal systems.
Shanahan previously taught at Temple University Beasley School of Law and Georgetown University Law Center. Her previous work on fees in the juvenile justice system earned her clinic the 2017 Clinical Legal Education Association award for the best case or project in the United States.
In 2013, Shanahan was named a Bellow Scholar by the Association of American Law Schools, an honor that recognizes law school faculty who are involved in efforts to reduce poverty or increase access to justice.
Shanahan has both public and private sector experience. She clerked for Judge Michael Baylson on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and Judge Jane R. Roth on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit. She then worked as a litigator for Williams & Connolly in Washington, D.C., and Hangley Aronchick Segal Pudlin & Schiller in Philadelphia. She launched her academic career at Columbia in 2009 when she began teaching the Legal Practice Workshop.
State civil courts are central institutions in American democracy. Though designed for dispute resolution, these courts function as emergency rooms for social needs in the face of the failure of the legislative and executive branches to disrupt or mitigate inequality. The authors reconsider national case data to analyze the presence of social needs in state civil cases and then use original data from courtroom observation and interviews to theorize how state civil courts grapple with the mismatch between the social needs people bring to these courts and their institutional design. This institutional mismatch leads to two roles of state civil courts that are in tension. First, state civil courts can function as violent actors. Second, they have become unseen, collective policymakers in our democracy. This mismatch and the roles that result should spur us to reimagine state civil courts as institutions. Such institutional change requires broad mobilization toward meeting people’s social needs across the branches of government and thus rightsizing state civil courts’ democratic role. (With Anna E. Carpenter, Alyx Mark, and Jessica Steinberg.)
Publications available on SSRN
“Lawyers must be society’s problem solvers, and law schools should prepare students for a variety of roles and shape them as leaders of the profession and society,” she says. “My goal is to help law students expand their idea of what lawyers do in pursuit of social justice to create change.”
Colleen Shanahan ’03 will establish a new community justice clinic as part of Columbia Law School’s expansion of its experiential learning programs.