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Nicole Hallett is a Clinical Professor of Law and directs the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic, which provides legal representation to immigrant communities in Chicago including individual representation of immigrants in removal proceedings, immigration-related complex federal litigation, and policy and community education projects on behalf of community-based organizations. Her scholarship focuses on immigration and labor/employment law, and in particular, how laws in these areas either promote or impede collective action and power-building in subordinated communities. In her practice, she specializes in creative lawyering through complex litigation and multi-pronged advocacy. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, NPR, The Nation, the Today Show, the Intercept, and the Associated Press, among other places.
For more background on Hallett’s work and advocacy, please see Charlie Savage, Testing Novel Power, Trump Administration Detains Palestinian After Sentence Ends, N.Y. Times, Mar. 26, 2019; Liz, Robbins, Owner Was Target, but Restaurant Workers Are Swept Up in Immigration Raids, N.Y. Times, Nov. 11, 2016; and Sarah Maslin Nir, The Price of Nice Nails, N.Y. Times, May 7, 2015.
Professor Hallett was previously an Assistant Clinical Professor at the University at Buffalo School of Law where she founded and directed the Community Justice Clinic and the US-Mexico Border Clinic, and a Robert M. Cover Clinical Teaching Fellow at Yale Law School where she co-taught the Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic. Before beginning her teaching career, Hallett was a Skadden Fellow and staff attorney at the Community Development Project of Urban Justice Center in New York City where she represented victims of human trafficking and labor exploitation. After graduating from Yale Law School, she clerked for the Honorable Mark R. Kravitz on the United States District Court of the District of Connecticut and the Honorable Rosemary S. Pooler of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. She also has a master’s degree from the University of Oxford in Refugee Studies.
Updated January 2023