Tulane Law welcomes three new faculty

Tulane Law is welcoming three new faculty members this fall, two with the nationally recognized Women’s Prison Project and another who joins as the newest Forrester Fellow.

Carlotta Lepingwell and Stanislav “Stas” Moroz join the law school as Clinical Instructors with the Women’s Prison Project, a collaboration between the Domestic Violence and Criminal Justice clinics.  Laura Lane-Steele becomes a Forrester Fellow, a teaching fellowship for early-career faculty. 

 Lepingwell was most recently Deputy Director of the Office of Capital and Forensic Writs in Austin, Texas, where she supervised five post-conviction attorneys and the training coordinator.  Before that, she spent eight years as a trial lawyer with the Bronx Public Defenders Office and the Orleans Parish Public Defender.  She is a 2008 graduate of the University of Ottawa Law School.

Moroz is veteran trial lawyer, most recently with the Orleans Parish Public Defender, where he represented thousands of clients over the past six years.  He graduated magna cum laude from NYU Law School, where he won an award for outstanding student performance in a clinic.

Both Lepingwell and Moroz are broadening the work of the Women’s Prison Project, which seeks to address the role of intimate partner violence in assessing criminal culpability. In addition to providing individual representation for post-conviction, parole, and clemency proceedings for clients, the program’s mission is to become a clearinghouse for domestic violence expertise and education.

The program will provide training and education for criminal justice professionals and inmate counsel substitutes and consultation to defense attorneys representing abused women charged with or convicted of crimes relating to their abuse. It plans to generate policy work to improve legal protections for victims who are defendants in the criminal justice system and produce training materials and practice manuals for prosecutors and defense attorneys.

 Lane-Steele was a complex litigation associate in Washington, D.C., with Steptoe & Johnson and served as a law clerk to Judge Jane Roth on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Philadelphia.  She is a 2016 cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School, where she was an editor of the Civil Rights Civil Liberties Law Review.  She has published several law review articles focusing on civil rights, sex discrimination, and gender identity.

She will be teaching Legal Research and Writing for first-year law students as a Forrester Fellow, a position designed for early-career educators who plan to apply as tenure-track law faculty.

 These most recent hires join two others who began their work this summer. Two new legal clinics have opened this summer, each with its own director. Long-time ACLU attorney Katharine Schwartzmann leads the new First Amendment Clinic, while immigration attorney Mary Yanik is leading the Immigrant Rights Clinic. Tulane now has eight legal clinics providing legal services and expertise to the community.