"Infused her clinical teaching with so much thought, care, and wisdom" -Jason P

“Welcome to the funhouse.” That was the subject line of the email Vanessa sent to me on January 21, 2012, right after I accepted an offer to join the faculty at Pace Law School. My inbox was flooded with welcome messages from my soon-to-be colleagues, but Vanessa’s was something different: it was heartfelt; it was both serious and funny; it was full of excitement for the future, expressed in four different languages; it ended by quoting Rick’s final words to Captain Renault in Casablanca. The email was all Vanessa, and it was a perfect introduction to the special world she created at Pace.

I was lucky to be Vanessa’s colleague from 2012 to 2019. For my first year, she invited me to co-teach the Immigration Justice Clinic while I got my bearings and began planning a new clinic. I quickly realized that I had the rare opportunity to work alongside a master clinical teacher—we taught the seminar together, we supervised students together, we traveled to courts and jails and prisons together, and, when chunks of the roof crashed through the clinic ceiling, we even shared a temporary “office” (really just adjoining cubicles) together. Mostly I just watched and learned, feeling inspired and more than a little intimidated by how Vanessa infused her clinical teaching with so much thought, care, and wisdom. I had never seen anything like it. I still haven’t.

But Vanessa has done more than set the highest standard for clinical legal education—she is a seemingly limitless source of strategies, readings, materials, and ideas for how best to do our work (often communicated via late-night emails in her signature font). I don’t know how I would have started my clinic at Pace without Vanessa’s help; she generously shared her encyclopedic knowledge of local politics and connected me with organizers and advocates throughout Westchester. I was a total newcomer to the area, and I’m sure that nobody would have returned my emails without her vouching for me. Once my clinic was up and running, I liked to think that it complemented Vanessa’s—we often worked with the same community groups (my clinic focusing on workers’ rights, hers on immigrants’ rights), and many of my favorite students would take my clinic as a 2L and then move into her clinic the following year. I knew they were in for a treat.

In the five years since I moved on to CUNY, I’ve seen how Vanessa continues to inspire and motivate everyone who knows her and her work. So many of her former students are now attorneys providing ethical, high-quality representation to their clients, doing their part to respond to the dire need for immigration legal services that Vanessa identified years ago. Her clinic, with its wide-ranging docket and up-for-anything spirit, continues under new leadership, including the aptly named Vanessa Merton Immigration Justice Fellow. And at CUNY, the law school that Vanessa helped design and build from the ground up, we remain committed to the mission that she and our other founders adopted forty years ago.

Vanessa is and always will be the model clinical teacher, colleague, and lawyer for all of us who join her in the fight for justice.

Jason P