Faculty Directory

Alan D. Minuskin

Associate Clinical Professor

Profile

Alan Minuskin directs Boston College Law School's Civil Litigation Clinic, in which he teaches and supervises student attorneys who advise and represent clients in family law, housing, and public benefits cases. He has taught litigation skills and ethics courses, including Introduction to Civil Litigation Practice, Negotiation, Pretrial Litigation, Introduction to Lawyering and Professional Responsibility, and the Law School's international externship program. He has twice been named Boston College Law School's Outstanding Professor of the Year (1999 and 2017). 

At BC Law, Professor Minuskin has developed and written elaborate case materials for, and taught innovative litigation practice courses. He created his first-year course, Introduction to Civil Litigation Practice, to give students an early, intensive, interactive exposure to litigation skills development and confrontation of ethics dilemmas common in practice. Additionally, Minuskin has written, produced, and directed an advocacy ethics training video in collaboration with BC Law and the University of California Hasting College of Law, as well as other materials for use in litigation practice training.

A member of the Massachusetts and federal bars, Minuskin has engaged in litigation training for practicing lawyers and frequently gives housing-rights training presentations to community organizations. He has been active in a variety of professional organizations committed to the expansion and reformation of programs designed to provide wider access to legal services and justice for economically disadvantaged people.

Prior to beginning his career as a clinical legal educator in 1979, Minuskin was a legal services attorney at Central Middlesex Legal Services and, through a small community practice he founded, a co-grantee of federal legal services funding for the provision of free legal services to the poor. From 1977 to 1984, he served as a part time, volunteer staff attorney at the Cambridgeport Problem Center (now De Novo Legal Services), where he collaborated with mental health professionals through an interdisciplinary approach to solve legal problems of indigent clients.