Lauren Aronson

Lauren R. Aronson joined the University of Illinois College of Law faculty in fall 2019 to direct the Immigration Law Clinic. Prior to joining the Illinois faculty, she taught and directed the Immigration Law Clinic as part of LSU Law’s Clinical Legal Education Program. She was also a Teaching Fellow at Michigan State University College of Law, where she taught in the Immigration Law Clinic, as well as a Refugee and Asylum Law seminar which explored the contours of the international refugee definition, compared related forms of protection, and examined U.S. asylum procedure.

Before joining the academy, Professor Aronson worked as a Staff Attorney at the National Immigrant Justice Center in Chicago for both the Immigrant Children’s Protection Project and the Immigration Legal Defense Project. At NIJC she routinely traveled to detention centers housing immigrant children where she conducted Know Your Rights presentations and legal screenings, in addition to screening adults for all forms of immigration relief and representing both populations before the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the Executive Office of Immigration Review. Professor Aronson served as the Immigrant and Refugee Advocate at the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinic at Harvard Law School where her practice focused on gender-based asylum claims. In a past life, Professor Aronson was a tax law associate at Dewey & LeBoeuf, LLP’s New York office.  Professor Aronson’s research focuses on U.S. immigration law’s treatment of immigrant children, particularly unaccompanied children.

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