About

Claudia Angelos is a Clinical Professor of Law at NYU School of Law, where she also serves as the Externship Director. She is an authority on prisoners’ rights and teaches lawyering and litigation courses. Angelos directs the Civil Rights Clinic, the Racial Justice Clinic, and the New York Civil Liberties Clinic at NYU Law. Over more than twenty years at the Law School, she and her students have litigated more than 100 civil rights cases in the New York federal courts. Her research focuses on civil rights, the First Amendment, lawyering, prisoners’ rights, and prisoners’ rights advocacy. Angelos is an honors graduate of Radcliffe College and Harvard Law School, and she is a member of Phi Beta Kappa. She has served as the long-time past president and now as the general counsel of the New York Civil Liberties Union, and she sits on the board and executive committee of the American Civil Liberties Union. Additionally, she is a member of the boards of the Prisoners’ Legal Services of New York and the Society of American Law Teachers. Her contributions to clinical legal education have been recognized with the 2015 national award as the Outstanding Advocate for Clinical Legal Education.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Law
• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Engineering
• Public relations
• Business
• Medicine

Selected publications

• Langdell's Subjects

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Diploma Privilege and the Constitution

  SMU Scholar (Southern Methodist University) · 2020-05-27

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The COVID-19 pandemic and resulting shutdowns are affecting every aspect of society. The legal profession and the justice system have been profoundly disrupted at precisely the time when there is an unprecedented need for legal services to deal with a host of legal issues generated by the pandemic, including disaster relief, health law, insurance, labor law, criminal justice, domestic violence, and civil rights. The need for lawyers to address these issues is great but the prospect of licensing new lawyers is challenging due to the serious health consequences of administering the bar examination during the pandemic.\nState Supreme Courts are actively considering alternative paths to licensure. One such alternative is the diploma privilege, a path to licensure currently used only in Wisconsin. Wisconsin’s privilege, limited to graduates of its two in-state schools, has triggered constitutional challenges never fully resolved by the lower courts. As states consider emergency diploma privileges to address the pandemic, they will face these unresolved constitutional issues.\nThis Article explores those constitutional challenges and concludes that a diploma privilege limited to graduates of in-state schools raises serious Dormant Commerce Clause questions that will require the state to tie the privilege to the particular competencies in-state students develop and avenues they have to demonstrate those competencies to the state’s practicing bar over three years. Meeting that standard will be particularly difficult if a state adopts an in-state privilege on an emergency basis. States should consider other options, including privileges that do not prefer in-state schools. The analysis is important both for states considering emergency measures and for those that might restructure their licensing after the pandemic.

  PublisherOA PDF

• Licensing Lawyers in a Pandemic: Proving Competence

  eYLS (Yale Law School) · 2020-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Diploma Privilege and the Constitution

  SMU Law Review Forum · 2020 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Law

  The COVID-19 pandemic and resulting shutdowns are affecting every aspect of society. The legal profession and the justice system have been profoundly disrupted at precisely the time when there is an unprecedented need for legal services to deal with a host of legal issues generated by the pandemic, including disaster relief, health law, insurance, labor law, criminal justice, domestic violence, and civil rights. The need for lawyers to address these issues is great but the prospect of licensing new lawyers is challenging due to the serious health consequences of administering the bar examination during the pandemic. State Supreme Courts are actively considering alternative paths to licensure. One such alternative is the diploma privilege, a path to licensure currently used only in Wisconsin. Wisconsin’s privilege, limited to graduates of its two in-state schools, has triggered constitutional challenges never fully resolved by the lower courts. As states consider emergency diploma privileges to address the pandemic, they will face these unresolved constitutional issues. This Article explores those constitutional challenges and concludes that a diploma privilege limited to graduates of in-state schools raises serious Dormant Commerce Clause questions that will require the state to tie the privilege to the particular competencies in-state students develop and avenues they have to demonstrate those competencies to the state’s practicing bar over three years. Meeting that standard will be particularly difficult if a state adopts an in-state privilege on an emergency basis. States should consider other options, including privileges that do not prefer in-state schools. The analysis is important both for states considering emergency measures and for those that might restructure their licensing after the pandemic.

  PublisherDOI

• The Bar Exam and the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Need for Immediate Action

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2020 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Business
  PublisherDOI

• Clinical Education - A Safe and Sure Pathway to Law Licensure

  eYLS (Yale Law School) · 2020-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  With the safety of in-person bar exams increasingly in question, it’s time for other options for lawyer licensing, say four law professors, all members of the Collaboratory on Legal Education and Licensing for Practice. Licenses can be based on law graduates’ successful completion of substantial credit hours in closely supervised law school clinical courses.

  Publisher

• Concurrent Session 5C. SALT Consumer Guide for Social Justice Minded Law Students

  Scholarly Commons (University of the Pacific) · 2012-01-01

  article

  The panel will present the Consumer Guide created by SALT’s Issues on Legal Education Committee. The Guide is designed to inspire social justice minded students to consider law as a viable career and to provide students with information on how to choose the best law school. In addition, the Guide encourages students to become better educated about law school admissions, curriculum and programmatic practices.

  Publisher

• Prison Overcrowding and the Law

  The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science · 1985-03-01 · 19 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article traces and analyzes the history of prison- and jail-crowding litigation in the federal courts since the 1960s. While prisoners and pretrial detainees have won many victories, the doctrinal basis for a constitutional right to uncrowded incarceration facilities remains unclear and is still evolving. Despite several recent Supreme Court decisions unfavorable to inmates, there has been no rejection of the principles (1) that the totality of conditions in prison—including crowding—must not amount to cruel and unusual punishment and (2) that jail crowding cannot be permitted to impose genuine privations over an extended period of time. In order to enforce the decrees outlawing overcrowding, judges have had to search for creative enforcement techniques. Many of these techniques are controversial and their effectiveness is disputed. The courts have forced the other branches of government to face up to crowded prisons and jails, and they have helped to ameliorate the suffering and deprivations that the overcrowding crisis has caused.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Mary Lu Bilek

  CUNY School of Law

  86 shared

• Carol Chomsky

  Twin Cities Orthopedics

  79 shared

• Marsha Griggs

  77 shared

• Andrea A. Curcio

  Georgia State University

  77 shared

• Eileen Kaufman

  76 shared

• Patricia E. Salkin

  76 shared

• Joan W. Howarth

  76 shared

• Sara Berman

  75 shared

Awards & honors

• Outstanding Advocate for Clinical Legal Education (2015)