Before joining the Law School faculty as director of the Immigration Clinic in 1996, Professor Benítez was on the faculty of the legal clinics at Chicago Kent College of Law and Northwestern University School of Law. 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. In addition, in the summers he has taught at the law schools of the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México and the Universidad Panamericana, in Mexico City. In 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.
Professor Benítez has devoted his entire legal career to working in the public interest, generally with aliens, and so he is familiar with immigration law in its proper context. Evictions, domestic violence, public benefits, etc., these are areas of law that influence the decisions made by the aliens. Professor Benítez was fortunate early in his career to be associated with several supportive, dedicated lawyers who enabled him to learn and progress from them. Therefore, he tries to pass on what he learned and how he learned it to his students, in particular the “learn by doing” system that his early colleagues used with him. That said, students will get out of their experience in this clinic and from their association with Professor Benítez what they put into it.
Jonathan Bialosky, Esq., supervises Immigration Clinic law students and provides legal representation to asylum seekers and respondents facing deportation in Immigration Court. He previously served as director of the Maxwell Street Legal Clinic in Lexington, Kentucky from January 2011 until July 2013, serving as the sole attorney at a nonprofit immigration law practice. Jonathan is a May 2010 honors graduate of the George Washington University School of Law. During law school, he completed an internship at the Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly Refugee Advocacy and Support Program in Istanbul, Turkey, where he provided legal assistance to refugees from the Middle East and Africa. He also interned at the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, the Migrant Legal Action Program, and Amnesty International in Washington, DC. Jonathan is admitted to practice law in New York and Kentucky as well as before federal immigration tribunals.
