Category: All Events

Wednesday, February 20th | 12:30pm

Please join GPS for lunch with Professor Hannah Demeritt. This event is capped at 10 students, so please RSVP here. Sponsored by the Government and Public Service Society. For more information, please contact Ellie Shingleton at eleanor.shingleton@duke.edu.

Professor Hannah Demeritt, a Clinical Professor of Law, is a supervising attorney in the Health Justice Clinic.

Professor Demeritt received her J.D., with high honors and membership in the Order of the Coif, from Duke Law School in 2004. She received her B.A. from Reed College (Portland, Oregon) in 1992. Between graduation from Reed and acceptance into Duke Law, she worked as a social worker, advocating for indigent clients, in Portland and in New York City. As a law student, Professor Demeritt performed pro bono work, interned at Legal Aid, and completed two of the Duke Law clinics. She was also a senior staff editor on Law and Contemporary Problems.

After graduating from Duke, Professor Demeritt clerked for the Honorable Robin Hudson for three years, at the North Carolina Court of Appeals and the North Carolina Supreme Court. After clerking, she practiced for three years as a solo practitioner in Durham, representing primarily indigent criminal defendants at the trial and appellate levels. She also represented juveniles in delinquency court and served on the Executive Committee of the Juvenile Defense Section of North Carolina Advocates for Justice from 2008-2010. In 2010, Professor Demeritt went to work as an assistant appellate defender in the North Carolina Office of the Appellate Defender. There, she served as co-counsel on JDB v. North Carolina, a case she had worked on pro bono in State court prior to joining the Office of the Appellate Defender. In June 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court decided JDB in her client’s favor.

From 2007- 2009, while still in solo practice, Professor Demeritt also worked part-time in the Health Justice Clinic at Duke, travelling the State to supervise students providing offsite legal assistance. She also taught legal writing to 1L’s at North Carolina Central University School of Law. Professor Demeritt has also been teaching legal ethics at Duke for several years and returned to work at Duke Law full-time, as a supervising attorney in the Health Justice Clinic, in 2011.

Wednesday, November 14th | 12:30pm

Please join GPS for lunch with Professor Anne Gordon. This event is capped at 10 students, so please RSVP here. Sponsored by the Government and Public Service Society. For more information, please contact Ellie Shingleton at eleanor.shingleton@duke.edu.

Professor Anne Gordon joins Duke’s clinical faculty as a senior lecturing fellow and director of Duke Law’s externship programs.  Externships enable students to earn academic credit while experiencing the real world of legal practice in a government or nonprofit setting.  Duke currently offers individual externships, faculty-mentored externships, and integrated externships, including Duke in D.C. and the Federal Public Defender’s Office externship.

Before joining Duke Law, Professor Gordon taught at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, where she helped lead the Appellate Advocacy Program and served as a senior research fellow at the California Constitution Center.  Her research focuses on the constitutional right to education.  She spent the 2015-2016 academic year as a distinguished visiting professor at Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey in Puebla, Mexico, teaching professional skills and comparative constitutional law.

Before teaching, Professor Gordon was a staff attorney with the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, and practiced criminal appellate law and capital habeas with the Habeas Corpus Resource Center and the Fifth and Sixth District Appellate Projects. She has also worked with refugees in Ethiopia, sex workers in Chicago, and farmers in Cambodia.

Thursday, October 25th | 12:30pm

Please join GPS for lunch with Professor Theresa Newman. This event is capped at 10 students, so please RSVP here. Sponsored by the Government and Public Service Society. For more information, please contact Ellie Shingleton at eleanor.shingleton@duke.edu.

Professor Newman is a clinical professor of law, co-director of the Wrongful Convictions Clinic, associate director of the Duke Law School Center for Criminal Justice and Professional Responsibility, and faculty adviser to the student-led Innocence Project. She has been at Duke since 1990 and served as the associate dean for academic affairs from 1999-2008.

Professor Newman is a member of the board of the international Innocence Network, an affiliation of more than sixty-five organizations dedicated to providing pro bono legal and investigative services to individuals seeking to prove their innocence and working to redress the causes of wrongful convictions. Until several years ago, she served as Network president.  She has also served as president of the North Carolina Center on Actual Innocence, a nonprofit organization she helped found, which is dedicated to assisting wrongly convicted North Carolina inmates obtain relief, and a member of the North Carolina Chief Justice’s Criminal Justice Study Commission (formerly the Commission on Actual Innocence), the North Carolina Chief Justice’s Commission on Professionalism, and the North Carolina Bar Association Administration of Justice Committee.