Biography

Professor Laila L. Hlass’ teaching and scholarship focus on law, policy and practices that affect access to justice within the immigration law regime for particularly vulnerable communities including children, detainees, asylum-seekers, and survivors of violence, as well as emerging pedagogy and practices in experiential learning. In 2020, Prof. Hlass helped established the Immigrant Rights Clinic, where she serves as Co-Director. In 2018, Prof. Hlass was awarded a Carol Lavin Bernick Faculty Grant to develop pedagogical films for experiential faculty, as part of the Legal Interviewing and Language Access Film Project. 

She regularly speaks and appears in the news regarding migration, refugees and immigrant children and has written op-eds for Slate, the Boston Globe and Times-Picayune.

Before joining Tulane Law School in 2017, Prof. Hlass taught at Boston University School of Law as a clinical associate professor, at Georgetown University Law Center as a clinical teaching fellow and at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law as a staff attorney and Equal Justice Works fellow in the Immigration Clinic. While at Loyola, she also directed the Office of Law Skills and Experiential Learning on an interim basis. Prior to that, she was awarded the Chadborne & Parke fellowship to provide legal services to immigrant children at the Door Legal Services.

Professor Hlass serves on the board of the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana and the Clinical Legal Education Association. While in law school, she co-founded the Student Hurricane Network, which recruited and placed more than 5,500 law students in pro bono assignments in regions affected by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.