Dean Melanie Leslie has announced two new appointments to the Cardozo faculty: Pamela Foohey and Alma Magaña.
Pamela Foohey will join the tenured faculty as a Professor of Law, having served as a visiting professor at Cardozo. Prior to coming to Cardozo, Foohey was on the Indiana University Maurer School of Law faculty and was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois College of Law. Alma Magaña will become the Harold A. Stevens Visiting Assistant Professor of Law.
Professor Foohey specializes in bankruptcy, commercial law and consumer law. Her work primarily involves empirical studies of bankruptcy and related parts of the legal system, combining quantitative and qualitative, interview-based research. She is a co-investigator on the Consumer Bankruptcy Project, a long-term research project studying persons who file bankruptcy which has been the leading empirical study of consumer bankruptcy for the past 35 years.
"Pamela Foohey has distinguished herself for her classroom expertise and renowned scholarship,” said Dean Leslie. “She brings a wonderful set of specializations to our outstanding business law program.”
Professor Foohey is the current chair of the Law and the Social Sciences Section of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) and is on the executive committees of several other AALS Sections. She is also a co-chair of the Law and Society Association’s Household Finance Collaborative Research Network. Professor Foohey currently serves on the editorial advisory board of the American Bankruptcy Law Journal, which is a peer-reviewed academic law review published by the National Conference of Bankruptcy Judges. In 2019, the American Bankruptcy Institute named her a “40 Under 40” Emerging Leader in Insolvency Practice.
She clerked for the Honorable Thomas L. Ambro of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, worked as an associate in the Bankruptcy and Financial Restructuring Group of Dorsey & Whitney LLP in Minneapolis, and clerked for the Honorable Peter J. Walsh of the Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware. Professor Foohey received a Bachelor of Science degree summa cum laude from New York University’s undergraduate Stern School of Business, where she majored in economics and finance, and a J.D. cum laude from Harvard Law School.
Alma Magaña will serve as the Harold A. Stevens Visiting Assistant Professor of Law. Magaña has been an attorney at the Legal Aid Society of New York City where she served as a staff attorney in criminal defense practice, a criminal immigration specialist in the immigration law unit, and a staff attorney on the parole revocation defense unit. She developed and implemented new strategies for challenging bail determinations in pre-trial detention, and instructed attorneys in strategies to eliminate unconstitutional detentions.
“Alma Magaña brings a wealth of experience in criminal defense, the parole system, decarceration and criminal-immigration law to her work,” said Dean Leslie. “She is passionate about helping people access their legal rights, and I am very pleased to welcome her to Cardozo.”
Magaña graduated from Penn State University, Dickinson School of Law. In law school, she was President of the Latino Law Students Association and Vice President of the Public Interest Law Fund.