Elie Hirschfeld Family Defense Fellow Amy Mulzer, Esq. Achieves a Victory

NYU Family Defense Clinic has achieved a major victory in NYS Appellate Courts, which will void several of the practices that have inhibited the ability of children to be reunited with their families after being placed in foster care. A victory for social justice, this is a legislature change the community of the FDC has been working to accomplish for many years. This victory came thanks to the work of fellow Amy Mulzer, recipient of the Elie Hirschfeld Family Defense Fellowship.

Elie Hirschfeld had previously established this fellowship for an attorney assisting in Family Defense Clinic cases, who would serve as counsel for parents of children who are in or at risk of entering into foster care.

“As an NYU Law alumnus, I am proud to be supporting Professor Guggenheim and the Family Defense Clinic and Fellowship,” said Hirschfeld. He noted that the program is serving an essential role in training law students to protect children and families.

Amy Mulzer is serving as the FDC’s first Elie Hirschfeld Fellow. A seasoned trial and appellate attorney in family defense and child welfare proceedings, Mulzer was an acting assistant professor of lawyering at NYU Law from 2014 to 2016, and a teacher at Brooklyn Law School’s Disability & Civil Rights Clinic during the 2016–17 academic year. She is a graduate of Columbia Law School.

Martin Guggenheim commented on the fellowship: “I am thrilled that Elie Hirschfeld will be supporting the important work of the Family Defense Clinic. Through his generous support, the clinic will, for the first time, be able to expand its efforts to include appellate advocacy.” He noted that the FDC can assist in appeals of cases that originated elsewhere and that raise important issues, in addition to filing appeals of its own.

The Family Defense Clinic was founded in 1991 as a children’s rights project committed to preventing overreaching by the government. The organization champions an interdisciplinary model that pairs lawyers with social workers to represent and rehabilitate families in child welfare cases. With a mission to prevent the needless removal of children from their families, the clinic’s model has helped raise the bar for family defense in throughout New York City and the country. The FDC has trained a generation of law students, many of whom continue to work for social justice in the areas of children’s and parents’ rights, operating within a wide variety of legal settings.