Deborah Weissman is the Reef Ivey II Distinguished Professor of Law. She was the Director of Clinical Programs from January 2001 through July 2010. She is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Syracuse University and graduated cum laude from Syracuse University Law School. Prior to teaching law, she has had extensive experience in all phases of legal advocacy, including labor law, family, education related civil rights, and immigration law in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Tampa, Florida, and as a partner in a civil rights firm in Syracuse, New York. From 1994 to 1998, she was Deputy Director and then Executive Director at Legal Services of North Carolina.
Weissman teaches the Immigration/Human Rights Policy Clinic, Domestic Violence Law, and has taught the Civil Lawyering Process and the Civil Litigation Clinic. Her recent publications include The Legal Production of the Transgressive Family: Binational Family Relationships Between Cuba and the United States(forthcoming North Carolina Law Review); The Moral Politics of Social Control: Political Culture and Ordinary Crime in Cuba(with Marsha Weissman) (forthcoming, Brooklyn J. of Int'l L. Jan 2010); Gender and Human Rights: Between Morals and Politics in Gender Equality (Lnda C. McClain and Joanna L. Grossman, eds. 2009); Domestic Violence in the PostIndustrial Household, In Violence against Women in Families and Relationships (Evan Stark and Eve Buzawa eds. 2009);Public Power and Private Purpose: Odious Debt and the Political Economy of Hegemony (with Louis A. Pérez, Jr.), 32 N.C. J. Int'l L. & Com. Reg. 699 (2007); The Personal is Political-- And Economic: Rethinking Domestic Violence, 2007 BYU L. Rev. 387 ( 2007); Proyecto de Derechos Humanos: Una Perspectiva Crítica, Revista Temas, Número 47 Julio Septiembre 2006; and The Political Economy of Violence: Toward an Understanding of the Gender-Based Murders of Ciudad Juárez, 30 N.C. J. Int'l L. & Comm. Reg. 795 (2005).
Professor Weissman serves as an Executive Committee member for The Consortium in Latin American Studies, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University, and as a member of the Advisory Board with The Institute for the Study of the Americas at the University of North Carolina.