LONEGAN APPOINTED TRUSTEE OF STATE BAR FOUNDATION

 

Bryan Lonegan of Montclair has been named a trustee of the New Jersey State Bar Foundation, an organization dedicated to promoting law-related education and giving all New Jersey residents a basic understanding of the legal system.

 

He has worked as a public interest lawyer since graduating law school more than 20 years ago. From 1989 to 2007 Lonegan was a staff attorney in the New York office of the Legal Aid Society's criminal defense, criminal appeals and civil litigation practices. From 2007 to 2011, he was a New Jersey State Bar Foundation fellow and visiting clinical professor at the Center for Social Justice of Seton Hall University School of Law-Newark, where he supervised the Immigrant Workers and International Human Rights Clinic. This year Bryan returned to the Legal Aid Society as a staff attorney in the organization's new Staten Island criminal defense practice.

 

While a Bar Foundation fellow at Seton Hall, Lonegan supervised clinical students representing a wide range of immigrant clients including applicants for asylum and cancellation of removal, domestic violence victims seeking U visas and labor trafficking victims seeking T visas. His clinic issued two widely publicized studies of wage theft and labor abuses of day laborers in New Jersey. He also taught courses on immigration law, state civil procedure and trial skills. In 2008 and 2009 he co-led student/faculty delegations supporting L'Ecole Superieure du Droit de Jeramie, a struggling law school in rural Haiti. He was voted Seton Hall's professor of the year in 2008.

 

Lonegan previously taught as adjunct faculty at the law schools of New York University and Hofstra University.  He is the author of American Diaspora: The Deportation of Lawful Residents from the United States and the Destruction of Their Families, 32 NYU Rev. L. & Soc. Change 55 (2007), Saints or Sinners: Child Soldiers and the Persecutor Bar to Asylum after Negusie v. Holder, 31 B.C. Third World L.J. 71 (2011). In 2006 he served on the New York State Bar Association's Special Committee on Collateral Consequences of Criminal Convictions. In 2008 he received the Human Rights Award by Chans Alternativ, a Haitian human rights organization, and was named one of the Top 100 Irish Americans by Irish America magazine.

 

In 1985-1986 he was a community organizer in Idaho working to improve public housing and services for the disabled and from1982-1984 served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Mali.

 

A New Jersey native, he received his B.A. in journalism from New York University and his J.D. from Vermont Law School.