AILA Presents Alberto M. Benitez with the 2024 Elmer Fried Excellence in Teaching Award

WASHINGTON, DC - The American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) recognizes Alberto M. Benitez of George Washington University Law School with the 2024 Elmer Fried Excellence in Teaching Award.

The letters nominating Professor Benitez ranged from current to past students, colleagues working with him daily, and those whom he taught once or twice years ago. They wrote about his dedication, his kindness, his desire to help them become better practitioners, and his guidance to always remember that immigration law is about people.

As one nominator put it, “Professor Benitez is an outstanding clinical law professor and an authority in immigration law issues, widely admired by students and faculty alike. Professor Benitez is not only incredibly knowledgeable [about] immigration law, but he is also generous in sharing his knowledge and mentoring students. He is kind, dynamic, energetic, and dedicated. His contributions to immigration law and its practice are boundless.”

Before joining the George Washington University law school faculty as Director of the Immigration Clinic in 1996, Alberto M. Benítez was on the faculty of the legal clinics at Chicago Kent College of Law and Northwestern University. Prior to becoming a clinician, he was a Staff Attorney at the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and the Legal Assistance Foundation of Chicago, as well as an intern at the Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Professor Benítez teaches Immigration Law I. In addition, in the summers, he has taught at the law schools of the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM) and the Universidad Panamericana, in Mexico City. During the spring 2003 semester, Professor Benítez was a visitor at the Boyd School of Law of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, assisting in the development of that law school’s immigration clinic.