Stanford Law School professor Juliet M. Brodie named faculty director of the Haas Center

Juliet Brodie will begin a five-year term as faculty director of the Haas Center for Public Service in the fall. (Image credit: Courtesy Stanford Law School)

Juliet M. Brodie has been named the Peter E. Haas Faculty Director of the Haas Center for Public Service by Provost Persis Drell.

Brodie, who directs the Stanford Community Law Clinic (CLC), has been a member of the Stanford faculty since 2006. She will succeed Deborah Stipek, who has served as the Haas Center faculty director since September 2016. Tom Schnaubelt, who joined the center as executive director in April 2009, will continue in that capacity. Brodie will start her five-year term in the fall, while continuing to lead the CLC.

Throughout her career as a clinical teacher, Brodie has led law school clinics embedded in low-income communities neighboring the universities. Before coming to Stanford, she directed the Neighborhood Law Project as an associate clinical professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School. An award-winning teacher, she is dedicated to creating an environment where novice lawyers can gain crucial practical skills representing real clients in civil legal aid matters, while exploring the value (and limits) of law as an instrument of social justice.

The CLC is the Stanford Law School’s off-campus legal services clinic where law students under supervision represent low-income people in civil cases. As director of the CLC, Brodie has supervised the representation of hundreds of low-income residents of the communities surrounding Stanford. During her tenure, the clinic has worked in the areas of wage theft, reentry, and social security disability benefits. Brodie herself has subject matter expertise in tenants’ rights, access to justice, and poverty law generally, and has been a senior consulting attorney to leading nonprofits in the Bay Area on eviction defense and tenant protection practices.

She is the co-editor of Poverty Law, Policy and Practice, and has written several articles on the mutually reinforcing values of clinical legal education and community lawyering.

Brodie served as associate dean of clinical education and director of the Mills Legal Clinic from 2013 to 2019, and was co-chair of Stanford’s strategic planning efforts on community engagement as part of the university’s Long-Range Vision planning effort in 2017-2019. In 2020-2021, she has been serving on the clinical program’s leadership team coordinating and implementing the program’s diversity, equity, inclusion and anti-racism efforts.

Provost Persis Drell said, “Juliet Brodie has a history of engagement with community—from her direction of the Community Law Clinic at Stanford Law School to her work as the co-chair of the Long-Range Vision planning group on engagement beyond our university, she has demonstrated her strong commitment to community and service. I am delighted that she is willing to take on this challenge and bring her talents to broaden the focus of the Haas Center to reach all of our students.” 

Brodie, a member of the Haas Center’s Faculty Steering Committee, said she looks forward to working with center staff to further infuse service into the academics and culture of the University.

She noted, “I’m humbled and excited to take on this new role. As a clinical law professor, I have spent my career at the place where universities’ teaching and research goals intersect with their public service mission, and I could not be happier to advance that work in this new capacity.”

The Haas Center inspires and prepares students to create a more just and sustainable world through service, scholarship and community partnerships. The center is the hub of Cardinal Service, a coordinated campus-wide effort to expand and sustain service as an essential feature of a Stanford education. Cardinal Service supports students to participate in community-engaged learning courses, pursue Stanford-supported fellowships and internships, build leadership skills through sustained service commitments, and explore public service careers and ways to integrate service into any career.

Sarah Church, vice provost for undergraduate education, said, “I’m excited about the vision that Juliet brings to the position of Haas Center faculty director at a time of heightened student involvement in public service opportunities—both as part of their educational journey as undergraduates and as part of their post-graduate future.”  

Brodie will lead the center in advancing new, five-year strategic initiatives closely aligned with the Stanford Vision’s focus on educating students for lives of civic purpose; accelerating solutions to local, national and global challenges; and supporting the University’s diverse community.

Stacey Bent, vice provost for graduate education and postdoctoral affairs, noted, “I’m thrilled that Juliet will be bringing her passion for student public service to the Haas Center. By combining the Haas Center’s existing programs with Juliet’s deep experience working with graduate and professional students, the Haas Center under Juliet’s leadership stands poised to provide even greater opportunities in public service for graduate students at Stanford.”

Her efforts will build on the substantial expansion of service at Stanford under Deborah Stipek, the Judy Koch Professor of Education and the former I. James Quillen Dean of the Stanford Graduate School of Education. Since 2016, Stipek has been instrumental in the success of the center’s Education Partnerships programs, growth in community-engaged learning courses across Stanford schools, launch of an ongoing effort to strengthen pathways to public interest technology careers, and expansion of support for graduate students in service.

“The Haas Center, and more broadly efforts to elevate public service at Stanford, have benefited from outstanding faculty leadership over the past two decades,” said Tom Schnaubelt, assistant vice provost and executive director of the Haas Center. “We’ve been incredibly fortunate to have top scholars who understand the importance of listening to student and community voices. Professor Brodie has practiced a distinctive scholarship of engagement through directing the Community Law Clinic in the local community. Like her predecessors, she will lead not just with words, but by example.”