Lyon

This summer, Cornell Law School welcomes new clinical faculty member Beth Lyon, and with her, a groundbreaking new course. Lyon is the founder of Cornell’s Farmworker Legal Assistance Clinic, one of the only legal clinics in the U.S. to assist farm workers and one of the first to serve rural immigrant communities.

“I'm thrilled to be joining the Cornell Law School community for this new initiative,” says Lyon. “Farmworkers are among the most vulnerable and subordinated people in our society, and Cornell Law School’s location and resources situate Farmworker Clinic students to provide excellent representation.”

Lyon is a national authority on laws and policies affecting immigrant workers. She has written extensively on domestic and international immigrant and farm worker rights. She is also a frequent speaker and panelist for academic and bar association conferences, addressing policy questions and practical issues of lawyering through interpreters and providing legal services to rural minorities.

The Farmworker Legal Assistance Clinic was made possible in part through support from an Engaged Curriculum grant from Engaged Cornell, which will support curriculum development to enrich the student learning experience.

It will serve workers in one of the world’s most difficult and dangerous occupations. Farmworkers experience geographic, linguistic and cultural isolation, separation from family, immigration insecurity reinforced by policing practices, workplace sexual violence and exclusion from protective employment laws. Working with the clinic’s community partners, student attorneys will handle immigration and employment matters on behalf of farmworkers in the region, work that will typically involve negotiation and often require litigation.

“In the months before opening the clinic, the response has been tremendous, with activists and community members throughout the region reaching out to ask for our collaboration on different cases,” says Lyon. “I’m looking forward to working with the students, who will be charting the new clinic’s identity as a legal service provider and developing an entrepreneurial approach to practice. I'm also excited to join the Cornell Law School clinical program, with top practitioners in areas of the law that will inform the new clinic's work.”

Lyon previously taught as a professor of law at Villanova Law School, where she was founding director of the school’s Farmworker Legal Aid Clinic and co-director of its Community Interpreter Internship Program. Prior to that, she was a staff attorney for Human Rights First, a consultant at the D.C. Coalition Against Domestic Violence and the Center on Housing Rights and Evictions, and the recipient of a three-year teaching fellowship at the International Human Rights Clinic at Washington College of Law, American University.

Among other service, she serves on the board of directors for the Global Workers Justice Alliance, a nonprofit agency that trains and assists advocates whose clients have returned to Mexico and Guatemala.

Owen Lubozynksi is a freelance writer for the Law School.