Laila Hlass and Mary Yanik, Authors

Professor Mary Yanik

Mary Yanik directs the Immigrant Rights Clinic, supervising students in representing immigrants in deportation defense, affirmative applications for lawful status, constitutional litigation, and strategic advocacy. She specializes in assisting immigrant workers, including victims of labor trafficking, and in defending constitutional rights of immigrants.

Yanik previously worked at the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice, leading a law & organizing practice in support of community-directed campaigns for labor, migrant, and racial justice. She served as local and trial counsel in federal litigation challenging the constitutionality of Louisiana’s marriage license law and, separately, prolonged immigration detention in Louisiana. She represented dozens of immigrant workers in reporting labor abuse to the Department of Labor, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and National Labor Relations Board, including the immigrant whistleblower who complained of unsafe conditions at the now-collapsed Hard Rock Hotel site in New Orleans.

She further represented immigrant workers and immigrant victims of crime in U and T visa applications based on their assistance to government officials, in part through supervising law students in the Tulane Immigrant Rights’ Practicum. After law school, she clerked for Judge David F. Hamilton of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.

In the Clinic, Professor Yanik teaches core lawyering skills alongside reflection on the role of lawyers, clients, and communities in addressing social injustice and power dynamics in legal relationships and legal systems. The Clinic represents individual detained immigrants in seeking release and relief from deportation and also engages in strategic advocacy in defense of migrant rights. Professor Yanik continues to monitor and enforce the federal consent judgment in Cacho v. Gusman, the landmark case that prohibits the Orleans Parish Prison from transferring most immigrants to federal immigration authorities. Yanik received her J.D. from Yale Law School in 2014.

Professor Laila L. Hlass

 As one of the nation’s leading scholars of immigration law with deep experience developing and teaching in immigration law clinics, Professor Laila L. Hlass’ teaching and scholarship focuses 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. Prof. Hlass brings more than a decade of immigration law experience and expertise to Tulane, having practiced immigration law extensively in Louisiana, as well as in Washington, D.C., New York City, and Boston. In her capacity as Director of Experiential Learning, Prof. Hlass oversees Tulane’s extensive externships program, maintains the academic quality within the experiential curriculum and develops other skills-training opportunities.

While at Tulane, Prof. Hlass has chaired the Access to Counsel committee of International Partners Outreach group, a university-wide coalition of staff and faculty dedicated to serving undocumented/DACAmented, as well as international students, staff and faculty. In this capacity, she has helped develop and launch the new immigration initiative of the Tulane Legal Assistance Program, where law students under the supervision of a contracted immigration attorney provide free bimonthly consultations to the Tulane immigrant and international community.  

 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. Prof. Hlass serves as Board President of the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana and a board member of the Clinical Legal Education Association. She also regularly serves as a reader for Equal Justice Works applications in the area of immigration, and regularly advises students about post-graduate public interest fellowships. 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.