Lori A. Nessel is a Professor, Dean’s Fellow and Director of the Center for Social Justice at Seton Hall University School of Law.  Professor Nessel came to Seton Hall Law School in 1995 after completing a Skadden Arps Public Interest Law Fellowship representing migrant farmworkers in Upstate New York and working at a small civil rights firm in New York City.  At Seton Hall, Professor Nessel regularly teaches immigration and refugee law courses and supervises live cases in the Immigration & Human Rights Clinic including claims under the Refugee Convention, Torture Convention, as well as cases involving human trafficking, family reunification and other forms of relief from deportation.   Under her supervision, the Clinic has won groundbreaking decisions, including one of the first rulings to recognize domestic violence as torture under the United Nations Convention Against Torture.  She has also taught Gender and the Law.

In 2006, Professor Nessel was appointed Director of the Center for Social Justice, home of the Law School’s large Clinical and Pro Bono Programs.  She has also been actively involved in designing the new International Human Rights/Rule of Law Project and is one of the principle faculty members engaged in the Haiti Rule of Law Project.  Professor Nessel’s international teaching, training and research experience includes:  lecturing at the L’ecole Superieure Catholique de Droit in Jeremie, Haiti in 2003 and 2007, teaching International Human Rights Law in Parma, Italy in 2002, providing clinical training in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 2006, and conducting comparative immigration law research in Spain as a Fulbright Senior Scholar in 2007-08.

Professor Nessel has written numerous scholarly articles on various aspects of immigration and international human rights norms including: the intersection of immigration and labor laws as it affects undocumented workers, gender and immigration issues, the Torture Convention, family reunification, post-conflict community justice mechanisms and gender-based torture in Rwanda, and the plight of migrant farmworkers.  Her scholarship has been published in top academic journals (including University of Minnesota Law Review and Harvard Civil Rights Civil Liberties Law Review) and republished in annual immigration anthologies.   She has also presented at numerous academic, immigration, clinical, community and religious-based conferences both locally and internationally.