[WEBINAR] Family Conference 2020

Professor Vicki Lens – Professor, Hunter College, City University of New York

Dr. Vicki Lens is currently a professor at the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College, City University of New York. She has dual degrees in both social work (B.S.W., M. S. W., Ph.D.) and law. Prior to receiving her Ph.D. in Social Welfare, Dr. Lens worked as a public interest lawyer. As a legal aid lawyer she provided legal services to low income people. She also served as an Assistant Attorney General under New York State Attorney General Robert Abrams. Her primary research interest is in socio-legal studies, where she uses ethnographic and other qualitative methods to study the judicial system, including an ethnographic study of child abuse and neglect cases in Family Court. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Fahs-Beck Fund for Research and Experimentation, The Robin Hood Foundation, The Lois and Samuel Silberman Fund of the New York Community Trust, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. She has authored over sixty articles in peer-reviewed journals, books, encyclopedias and law reviews and is the author of Poor Justice: How the Poor Fare in the Courts, published by Oxford University Press.  She has presented her research and lectured at universities, community organizations, and government agencies, including assisting in the training of administrative law judges and family court judges in New York State. She is also a founding member of the International Society for Therapeutic Jurisprudence.