Thursday March 24

2016

Finding Creative Solutions to Avoid Termination of Parental Rights

About the Faculty

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  Emma Alpert (Speaker)

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  Emma Alpert is a Senior Staff Attorney at Brooklyn Defender Services. She first joined BDS's Family Defense Practice in 2009 as a Yale Law School Public Interest Fellow, focusing on the intersection of housing and child welfare. She has continued to engage in housing advocacy at the individual and policy levels on behalf of families involved in the child welfare system. Since December 2014, Emma has specialized in litigating res ipsa cases. Emma is a graduate of Yale Law School, where she was a managing editor of the Journal of Law and Feminism and participated in the Capital Punishment, Immigration, and Domestic Violence Clinics. While in law school, she also worked with the San Francisco Affirmative Litigation Project and spent summers interning with the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California and the Legal Aid Society of New York's Homeless Rights Project. Prior to Law School, Emma earned her B.A. with High Honors from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, where she was Phi Beta Kappa, and majored in English, though she wrote her Thesis with the Art History Department. She has worked in Brooklyn and Manhattan as a paralegal, a restaurant server, and a researcher at the Vera Institute of Justice.

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  Eileen Choi (Speaker)

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  Eileen Choi, Staff Attorney, Brooklyn Family Defense Project, Brooklyn Defender Services. CUNY Law School - J.D., 2007 and Oberlin College - B.A., 2000. Held Legal Internships at: CUNY Immigrant and Refugee Rights Clinic, Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, and Legal Aid Society. I represent low-income parents in Article 10 abuse/neglect proceedings.

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  Tarek Ismail (Speaker)

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  Tarek joined the BDS Family Defense Practice in February 2014. Prior to that, Tarek was the Counterterrorism & Human Rights Fellow at Columbia Law School's Human Rights Institute. In that role, Tarek researched and wrote on issues ranging from administrative detention, targeted killings, and US domestic counterterrorism policy. Tarek is the lead author on a report co-published with Human Rights Watch, which examined and exposed human rights abuses in domestic counterterrorism prosecutions, Illusion of Justice: Human Rights Abuses in US Terrorism Prosecutions. Tarek graduated from Columbia Law School in 2011, where he served as a Notes & Submissions Editor for the Human Rights Law Review. As a student and teaching assistant in the Human Rights Clinic, Tarek researched and wrote on US counterterrorism policy, including the use of diplomatic assurances as a mechanism to deport individuals to torture. Tarek also represented Dominicans of Haitian descent in a mass expulsion case against the Dominican Republic at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Tarek holds a B.A. with Distinction in Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia. He was born and raised in Toledo, Ohio.

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  Jessica Marcus (Speaker)

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  Jessica Marcus is a supervising attorney at the Brooklyn Family Defense Project (“BFDP”). She was a founding member of BFDP and has been a supervisor since November, 2007. Prior to the founding of BFDP in July, 2007, Ms. Marcus worked as a staff attorney in the Family Law Unit at South Brooklyn Legal Services, where she represented parents and relatives of children in foster care seeking to reunite their families, and conducted education and outreach regarding the rights of parents with children in the child welfare system. She began in 2001 with a two-year fellowship from Equal Justice Works, focusing on the effects of the Adoption and Safe Families Act on families in the permanency hearing stage of child welfare cases. In addition to her work on individual cases, she developed a joint project with the Legal Aid Society and Lawyers for Children to advocate for the Administration for Children's Services to expand access to housing assistance for families seeking to reunify with children in foster care, or whose children are at risk of foster care placement due to lack of adequate housing. In March, 2006, Ms. Marcus published an article in the N.Y.U. Law School's Review of Law and Social Change on the effects of the federal Welfare Reform Act of 1996 on families involved in the child welfare system. Ms. Marcus graduated in 2001 from N.Y.U. Law School, where she was a Sinsheimer Public Service Scholarship recipient and participated in the Family Defense Clinic, which represents parents and relatives of children involved in the child welfare system. Prior to law school, she was employed for two and a half years as a paralegal in the Legal Aid Society's Homeless Rights Project, working on class action litigation and individual advocacy on behalf of homeless families seeking shelter in the New York City shelter system.

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  Lynn Vogelstein (Speaker)

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  Lynn Vogelstein was an attorney in the family law unit at South Brooklyn Legal Services and is now one of BFDP's senior supervising attorneys.