Martin Guggenheim is the Fiorello LaGuardia Professor of Clinical Law at New York UniversitySchool of Law. Guggenheim teaches a law school clinic in which law students represent parents in abuse, neglect, foster care review, and termination of parental rights proceedings. He writes and lectures on the rights of young people and the rights of parents in the legal system, and has litigated several important juvenile rights and parents' rights cases in the federal and state courts. Upon graduating from law school, Guggenheim was a staff attorney with The Legal Aid Society's Juvenile Rights Division, where he represented children in delinquency and child protection proceedings, then a staff attorney and Acting Director of the ACLU's Juvenile Rights Project, and then joined the faculty of NYU School of Law, where he served as director of NYU's clinical and advocacy programs for half a decade. He is a recipient of the American Bar Association's Livingston Hall award for outstanding advocacy in the field of juvenile justice.
Vivek S. Sankaran is a clinical professor of law and directs both the Child Advocacy Law Clinic and the Child Welfare Appellate Clinic at the Universityof Michigan Law School. Sankaran also founded the Detroit Center for Family Advocacy, which aims to safely reduce the number of children in foster care by providing families with legal and social work advocacy.
Professor Sankaran’s research and policy interests center on improving outcomes for children in child abuse and neglect cases by empowering parents and strengthening due process protections in the child welfare system. Sankaran sits on the steering committee of the ABA National Project to Improve Representation for Parents Involved in the Child Welfare System. He has litigated numerous cases on behalf of parents before the Michigan Supreme Court. He also has authored scholarly pieces and practical resource guides to assist professionals working with parents in the system and regularly conducts national and statewide training on these issues.
Sankaran earned his BA, magna cum laude, from the College of William and Mary. He earned his JD, cum laude, from Michigan Law School, where he was an associate editor of the Michigan Law Review. After law school, he joined “The Children’s Law Center (CLC)” as a Skadden Fellow and became a permanent staff attorney with the CLC in September 2003. Sankaran was named the “2004 Michigan Law School Public Interest Alumni of the Year” and in 2006 and was certified as a child welfare specialist by the National Association of Counsel for Children. In 2011, he was named the “Parent Attorney of the Year” by the Michigan Foster Care Review Board.
