"She fights for what’s right all the time, in every way, and never stops" -Jim K

1978: I’m a student and Vanessa is my teacher in the NYU Law School Criminal Justice Clinic. Walking down a subway platform one night, we come across a shabbily dressed man lying asleep on a bench, with dollar bills conspicuously sticking out of his pocket. Vanessa immediately recognizes that he’s an undercover cop trying to lure passersby to lift the cash and get arrested for robbery. “He’s a cop!” she shouts at the top of her lungs, to make sure no one falls into the trap. “He’s a cop! This guy’s a cop!”

Oh, my God! I think. Who does that? You could get in trouble for doing that.

Answer: Vanessa Merton does that. And she doesn’t care if she gets in trouble. She’s completely brave. She knows our rights. She knows what’s right. And she fights for what’s right all the time, in every way, and never stops.

When we crossed paths 40 years later, in 2018, Vanessa was still at it, leading Pace Law School’s Immigration Justice Clinic. She welcomed me as a valued colleague and gave me the opportunity to help out as a volunteer attorney on the case of a teenaged boy who fled the gangs of El Salvador. Vanessa endlessly supported my efforts, and persisted in expressing deep gratitude for my work well past the point at which anyone lacking her saint-grade patience might have concluded that I was more trouble than I was worth.

One day that June, writing Vanessa another of my too many emails asking kindergarten-level how-to questions about the form and content of an asylum application, I expressed the hope that maybe, just maybe, at long last she might be away on a bit of a vacation.

At 5:56 a.m., on June 28, she emailed me an exhaustive, point by point reply to all of my questions, just as she always did. But before delving into the procedural nitty gritty, she banged out a paragraph about what she’d been up to. I share that paragraph—emailed, remember, at 5:56 a.m. — to celebrate Vanessa’s amazing power as a writer:

"Yes I have been traveling, not exactly on vacation although the changes of scene do count. Going to gatherings of immigration lawyers, allegedly to learn and in a sense teach, but more I think to gratify the blind instinctual need for the primitive intellectual body-warmth of shared anguished understanding, the deep-seated desire to huddle in proximity with those who mirror our own swirling miasma of pain rage despair loathing fury and cold steel hard resolve. In rapid succession over the last three weeks in Chicago, Philadelphia, Toronto, California: the Clinical Law Professors’ Immigration Section, the Immigration Law Scholars, the Law and Society Immigration Lawyers, and now the grand finale, the American Immigration Lawyers Association, 7000+ of us gathered in the cavernous football field-sized ballrooms of elderly grand hotels, with waves of ironic wisecracks and bitter bon mots rising from us like the hot mist from overspent athletes. We want to burn buildings and crash through walls and instead we are signing amicus briefs and writing bond motions, trying to assuage bewilderment and succumbing to the frightened tears of parents who fear to lose their children forever."

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Vanessa won the case, of course, though it took five years. The boy and his mother and siblings all have asylum.

Can you even begin to imagine how many people she has helped?

Thank you, Vanessa.

-Jim K