Professor Lenni Benson has been teaching and writing in the field of immigration law since 1994. She is a professor at New York Law School and serves as the director of the NYLS Safe Passage Project, a project that trains students and pro bono attorneys to represent unaccompanied immigrant youth in removal proceedings. [http://www.safepassageproject.org]
In the fall of 2012 she became the Chair of the Immigration and Nationality Law Committee for the Association of the Bar of the City of New York. In that capacity she has been leading several subcommittees focused on the rights of juvenile immigrants and working for greater due process protections, access to counsel and reduced detention in the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Initiatives. Work of that committee is reported here: http://www.nycbar.org/legislative-affairs/policy-issues-aamp-advocacy/protected-classes-aamp-civil-rights/immigration-a-nationality-law-committee.
In 2011-2012 she served as a consultant/researcher for the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS). With Russell Wheeler of the Brookings Institution, she prepared a comprehensive report on ways to improve removal adjudication and that report resulted in a formal adoption of over thirty-eight recommendations by ACUS.
The report is found here: http://www.acus.gov/report/immigration-removal-adjudication-report
She is the past chair of the AALS Immigration Law Section and past immigration committee chair for the ABA Section on Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice. Prior to joining academia, she practiced immigration law as a partner in the Los Angeles office of Bryan Cave, LLP. She is a native Arizonan and earned her law degree at the Arizona State College of Law in 1983. She has been an adjunct professor at Columbia teaching both immigration law and a seminar on refugee law. Professor Benson is an emeritus trustee of the American Immigration Law Foundation (now the American Immigration Council) and is a fellow of the American Bar Foundation. Until 2012, she was a member of the LexisNexis Faculty Advisory Board. For many years she has served on the Board of the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law. She also serves as an expert witness on immigration law topics in administrative, civil, and criminal litigation.
On July 1, 2013, her book written with several co-authors, "Immigration and Nationality Law: Problems and Strategies" was published by LexisNexis. http://www.lexisnexis.com/store/catalog/catalog.jsp?pageName=catalogProducts&catId=cat80002&id=cat80088