05/05/04- Boston College Law School is pleased to announce that Professor Paul Tremblay has won the 2004 Award for Outstanding Advocate for Clinical Teachers, given by the Clinical Legal Education Association (CLEA) at the annual AALS Clinical Conference. The award serves to recognize an outstanding clinical teacher in three areas: commitment to the field; advancement of the profession; and enhancement of the community’s spirit.

“Paul commands the respect of his students, his clinical colleagues and the academy,” said Alexis Anderson, Director of Advocacy Programs at the Law School. “On a daily basis, he advocates for the poor and homeless in our civil clinic which serves as the legal services office for the surrounding law school community. His clinic students praise him for his active mentoring and his keen ability to walk the fine line between supportive supervisor and challenging critic. His faculty colleagues – clinical and podium professors alike - respect his stellar analytical ability and profound dedication to the art of teaching.”

A letter of support submitted by his colleagues during the nomination process drew attention to Tremblay’s dedication to the Law School’s mission of service to others. “Many clinicians abandon - or at least reduce - the less glamorous parts of the job - supervision and direct service to individual poor people; others choose to take up scholarship at the expense of direct service. Paul has stayed true to the roots of direct, client-centered service to both students and clients. Furthermore he has dignified clinical work and our clients by dealing with ethical issues involved in poverty law and clinics at the highest intellectual and scholarly level.

“Paul’s contributions to clinical education do not stop at our law school’s door. Instead, Paul seeks opportunities to advance our communal mission through his clinical scholarship. Having advocated vocally for his indigent clients during the day, Paul devotes his nights to distilling his thoughts on the moral contours of lawyering. On occasion, those ideas surface in advice to his profession on their ethical duties in his role as Co-Chair of the Boston Bar Association Ethics Committee (2000-2003). At other times, Paul’s articles challenge each of us to define our own roles in the pursuit of social justice.”

Tremblay has written frequently and persuasively about the role of casuistry in legal ethics, particularly as it affects poverty law practice. Most recently, he has offered an interdisciplinary perspective on client-centered counseling. Initially developed in separate articles, and then integrated into the existing model of such counseling popularized by Binder, Bergman and Price, Tremblay has brought a multi-cultural focus to clinical teaching by translating the teaching on heuristics and biases from other disciplines to the legal context (Binder, Bergman, Price and Tremblay, Lawyers as Counselors: A Client-Centered Approach (2d ed.) (2004); and “Client-Centered Counseling and Moral Activism,” 30 Pepperdine L. Rev. 591 (2003).

Tremblay served a three-year term on the Board of Editors of the Clinical Law Review (1998-2001) and then was a contributing editor in 2001 and 2002. In addition, he has been a frequent panelist and contributor at clinical conferences and symposia, including AALS conferences, the recent Pepperdine symposium, the NYU Clinical Theory Workshop, and the New England Regional Clinicians’ Conferences (co-organizer with Russell Engler). In addition to his work on the Boston Bar Association’s Ethics Committee, he has also co-chaired an AALS Clinical Section committee on ethics and professionalism.