AILA Presents Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia with the 2019 Elmer Fried Excellence in Teaching Award

WASHINGTON, DC - The American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) will recognize Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia, Director of the Center for Immigrants' Rights Clinic at Penn State Law with the 2019 Elmer Fried Excellence in Teaching Award this week during AILA's Annual Conference in Orlando, FL.

Professor Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia is an expert on immigration law whose research focuses on the role of prosecutorial discretion in immigration law and the intersections of race, national security, and immigration. She has published more than thirty law review articles, book chapters, and essays on immigration law. Her scholarship has been cited in hundreds of works and also by federal court judges, including Judge Richard Posner, Judge Paul J. Watford, and Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw. Her first book, Beyond Deportation: The Role of Prosecutorial Discretion in Immigration Cases, was published by New York University Press as a paperback in 2017 and named an honorable mention for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. Her second book, Banned, examines immigration enforcement during the first eighteen months of the Trump administration and will be published by New York University Press in 2019. Wadhia is also working on the second edition of an immigration case book with Steve Yale-Loehr and Lenni Benson, to be published in 2020 by Carolina Academic Press.

At Penn State Law, Wadhia teaches doctrinal courses in immigration and asylum and refugee law. She is also the founder and director of the Center for Immigrants' Rights Clinic (CIRC), an in-house clinic focused on three main areas: community outreach and education; pro bono support in immigration cases; and policy work for institutional clients across the country. Recently, students at CIRC worked on asylum cases for detained families, completed a report on the lived experiences of law students and lawyers with DACA, trained police officers in the State College Area Police Department on immigration, and completed a U application for a victim of crime. The CIRC celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2018 and enjoys a national reputation.

Wadhia sits on the Board of Trustees for the American Immigration Council and in 2018 was named the inaugural Editor-In-Chief of the AILA Law Journal. Wadhia has also been a lead or co-lead on law professor letters and amicus briefs pertaining to her expertise, including but not limited to DACA, the travel ban and recent asylum changes. She has also blogged for the American Constitution Society, American Immigration Council, Yale Journal on Regulation's Notice & Comment, Immigration Professors Blog and most recently, Harvard Law Review.