Martin Guggenheim to Deliver 2024 Katz Lecture
Martin Guggenheim, Fiorello LaGuardia Professor of Clinical Law Emeritus at New York University Law School, will deliver the 10th annual Katheryn D. Katz ’70 Memorial Lecture on Wednesday, October 30, 2024 at 5:30 p.m.
He will present the lecture titled “Children Deserve Better than What the United States Offers Them. A Critique of the ‘Child Welfare System’.”
Professor Guggenheim is one of the nation’s foremost experts on children’s rights and family law. He taught at NYU School of Law from 1973 until his retirement in 2022. He served as Director of Clinical and Advocacy Programs from 1988 to 2002 and also was the Executive Director of Washington Square Legal Services, Inc. from 1987 to 2000. For 15 years, he taught the Juvenile Rights Clinic in which students represented accused juvenile delinquents in New York’s Family Court. He then created the Family Defense Clinic, which represents parents and other adult relatives of children in foster care in New York City.
Guggenheim has been an active litigator in the area of children and the law and has argued leading cases on juvenile delinquency and termination of parental rights in the Supreme Court of the United States. Guggenheim is also a well-known scholar, having published more than 50 book chapters and articles in leading law reviews in the United States, including Columbia, Harvard, Michigan, NYU and Yale Law Reviews. His research has focused on adolescent abortion, First Amendment rights in schools, the role of counsel for children in court proceedings, empirical research in child welfare practice, juvenile justice and family law. He is the author of seven books on children and parents including What’s Wrong with Children’s Rights was published by Harvard University Press in 2005.
In addition to his teaching and scholarship, Guggenheim served as an advisor to the American Law Institute, Restatement on Children and the Law, a member of the New York State Commission on Parental Legal Representation, co-chair of the American Bar Association’s National Alliance for Parent Representation, President of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, and a member of the Juvenile Justice Subcommittee, American Bar Association Section on Criminal Justice.
He is also a founding board member of the Center for Family Representation, New York City and the Clinical Law Review.
Guggenheim is a 1971 graduate of NYU School of Law where he was an Arthur Garfield Hays Civil Liberties Scholar. After law school, Guggenheim worked at the Juvenile Rights Division of New York City’s Legal Aid Society as a staff attorney and in its special litigation unit. He also was a staff attorney for four years in the Juvenile Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation.
The Katheryn D. Katz ’70 Lecture Series was established in 2014 with a focus on the family law topics that Katz made central to her teaching, including domestic violence, gender and the law, children and the law, reproductive rights, and inequality.
Previous Katz lectures were delivered by Professors Melissa Breger (2015), Donna Young (2016), Mary A. Lynch (2017), Stephen Clark (2018), Jessica Knouse ’04 of the University of Toledo College of Law (2019), Rutgers Law School Co-Dean and Professor Kimberly Mutcherson (2020), Georgetown Law Professor Kristin Henning (2021), Dean of Temple University Beasley School of Law Rachel Rebouche (2022), and Edward Ross Aranow Clinical Professor Emerita of Law at Columbia Law School Jane M. Spinak (2023). To learn more about the lecture, click here.
