Sarah Paoletti

Sarah Paoletti comes to Penn Law to head up our new Transnational Clinic where students explore the lawyer’s work in settings that cut across cultures, borders, languages and legal systems.

The clinic provides students an opportunity to engage in direct legal representation of individual and organizational clients in matters that raise a myriad of international and comparative legal norms in a variety of international and domestic venues.

Most recently Paoletti was a practitioner-in-residence in the International Human Rights Law Clinic at the Washington College of Law at American University, where she also taught a seminar on the labor and employment rights of immigrant workers. Her areas of specialty include international human rights, immigrant rights, asylum law, and labor and employment. She has presented before committees of both the United Nations and the Organization of American States on the Rights of Migrant Workers, and has been closely involved in the application of international human rights norms to undocumented workers in the United States. Prior to joining the faculty at WCL, she was staff attorney at Friends of Farmworkers, Inc., where she first began as an Independence Foundation Public Interest Fellow. She was later a Skadden Fellow for the same organization. During her time at Friends of Farmworkers, and in the years since, she has participated in numerous trainings and presentations on providing access to clients with limited-English proficiency, both on the part of legal services and law school clinical programs, as well as on the part of public entities, such as the state and federal Departments of Labor. From 1999 to 2000, she was a law clerk for the Hon. Judge Anthony J. Scirica, U.S. Court of Appeals, 3rd Circuit.