Nancy Cook
Associate Professor of Law
Director, Community Justice & Legal Assistance Clinic
Professor Nancy Cook came to Roger Williams in 2003 after having served as director of Cornell Law School’s clinical programs, and having also taught at American University and the University of New Mexico.
A graduate of Georgetown University Law Center, Professor Cook held an appellate clerkship and served as an appellate staff attorney for the Maryland Public Defender’s Office before entering academia. She has been admitted to practice in four states and the District of Columbia, and has handled hundreds of appeals at the state and federal levels, as well as countless cases in trial level courts.
Professor Cook is a nationally recognized leader in clinical legal education and a recipient of the Clinical Legal Education Association’s Outstanding Advocate Award. The Community Justice and Legal Assistance Clinic, which Professor Cook directs, is an innovative model of experiential learning, interdisciplinary collaboration, holistic client services and community investment.
Her involvement locally in community work includes active service on behalf of crime victims, teen parents, incarcerated youth, and many other groups. At the national level, Professor Cook has served on the executive committee of the Association of American Law School Clinical Legal Education Section, the Board of Governors of the Society of American Law Teachers (SALT) www.saltlaw.org. and the Board of Directors for the Clinical Legal Education Association. (CLEA) www.cleaweb.org.
For fifteen years, she has been actively engaged in community-based lawyering and she has organized four national workshops in this developing field. Professor Cook is frequently called on as a presenter on issues relating to community collaborations, creative approaches to law practice and teaching, and critical race, class and gender theory.
Professor Cook has integrated into her law and teaching career a love of literature. She holds a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing and has published several stories in law, social policy and literary journals. Many of her stories concern social or legal issues, such as domestic violence, capital punishment, adoption and sexual harassment. She has conducted readings and made presentations in multiple forums around the country, including the Law and Literature Series lectures at Loyola, Chicago, the University of Cincinnati's Symposium on Law and Literature, a Conference on Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, and a Women’s Studies Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In addition to teaching a Law Through Literature seminar in the law school, Professor Cook has taught creative writing in both undergraduate institutions and correctional facilities.
Professor Cook’s scholarship reflects her broad experience and interest in social justice. Her recent articles include Looking for Justice on a Two-Way Street in the Washington University Journal of Law and Policy and A Call to Affirmative Action for Fiction’s Heroes of Color; Or How Hawkeye, Huck and Atticus Foil the Work of Antiracism in the Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy. Currently, she is at work on an article tracing the religious, legal and literary roots of the act of witnessing
