Career At The University of Michigan
After private practice and prior to coming to UNM, Scarnecchia returned to the University of Michigan Law School, where she was a member of the faculty and Associate Dean for Clinical Affairs and taught in the Child Advocacy Law Clinic.
For 12 years, she worked in the University of Michigan Child Advocacy Law Clinic, concentrating on civil child abuse and neglect. One of the cases that came into the clinic involved Jan and Roberta DeBoer, an Ann Arbor couple who were trying to adopt a child known as Baby Jessica. The case attracted national attention because the baby's biological parents sought the return of the 2-year-old girl. After a long court battle, the Michigan Supreme Court ordered the DeBoers to return the child to her parents in Iowa. Ever since, Scarnecchia has occasionally provided advocacy in similar cases across the country.
Additional courses she taught at Michigan included Women and the Law Clinic, Civil Clinic, Child Abuse and Neglect Interdisciplinary Seminar, Negotiation, Access to Justice and Family Law.
At Michigan, Scarnecchia suggested a position be created to oversee all of the clinics at that law school. The school's administrators agreed and she became the first person to serve as clinic coordinator, a position she held for two years, before being named Associate Dean for Clinical Affairs. Scarnecchia received the additional title of Associate Dean for Law School Administration for two years. Her management interests spread to the central university where, for eight months in 2002, she worked on special assignment to the provost's office, handling the duties of assistant provost for academic and faculty affairs.
Scarnecchia has served on the board of directors of the Clinical Legal Education Association and was a panelist on the Michigan Attorney Disciplinary Board until she moved to New Mexico. She was a technical adviser on the Michigan Supreme Court Task Forces on Gender and Race Bias in the Courts and was board president of the Battle Creek Area Organization Against Domestic Violence, which she helped establish. Scarnecchia is a past president of the Women Lawyers Association of Michigan.
Read more about this topic: Suellyn Scarnecchia
Famous quotes containing the words career and/or university:
“It is a great many years since at the outset of my career I had to think seriously what life had to offer that was worth having. I came to the conclusion that the chief good for me was freedom to learn, think, and say what I pleased, when I pleased. I have acted on that conviction... and though strongly, and perhaps wisely, warned that I should probably come to grief, I am entirely satisfied with the results of the line of action I have adopted.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“In bourgeois society, the French and the industrial revolution transformed the authorization of political space. The political revolution put an end to the formalized hierarchy of the ancien regimé.... Concurrently, the industrial revolution subverted the social hierarchy upon which the old political space was based. It transformed the experience of society from one of vertical hierarchy to one of horizontal class stratification.”
—Donald M. Lowe, U.S. historian, educator. History of Bourgeois Perception, ch. 4, University of Chicago Press (1982)