About

Faculty Director

Daniel Kanstroom is Professor of Law, Thomas F. Carney Distinguished Scholar, Faculty Director of the Rappaport Center for Law & Public Policy, Director of the International Human Rights Program, and an Associate Director of the Boston College Center for Human Rights and International Justice. He teaches Immigration and Refugee Law, International Human Rights Law, Constitutional Law, Administrative Law, and the International Human Rights Semester in Practice. Professor Kanstroom was the founder of the Boston College Immigration and Asylum clinic in which students represent indigent noncitizens and asylum-seekers. Together with his students, he has won many high-profile immigration and asylum cases and has provided counsel for hundreds of clients over more than a decade. He and his students have also written amicus briefs for the U.S. Supreme Court, organized innumerable public presentations in schools, churches, community centers, courts and prisons, and have advised many community groups. He was a co-founder of the Immigration Spring Break Trips, where students work on immigration law cases during their Spring Break. Professor Kanstroom’s newest initiative, the Post-Deportation Human Rights Project, seeks to conceptualize and develop a new field of law while representing US deportees abroad and undertaking empirical study of the effects of deportation on families and communities.

Executive Director

Elisabeth J. Medvedow serves as the Inaugural Executive Director of the Rappaport Center for Law and Public Policy having joined Boston College Law School in 2015.

Medvedow continues in her distinguished career in nonprofit management. For many years before coming to BC Law School, she was Executive Director of Discovering Justice, a civic education nonprofit housed in the Moakley U.S. Courthouse that teaches elementary and middle school students about democracy, justice, social studies, and law. Prior to Discovering Justice, Medvedow championed women lawyers as Executive Director of the Women’s Bar Association and Women’s Bar Foundation, the charitable affiliate which brought pro bono legal services to victims of domestic violence, elderly women and men, homeless women, and women prisoners.

For a decade before entering the nonprofit arena, Medvedow was an appellate prosecutor at the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office. She has briefed and argued numerous cases before the First Circuit Court of Appeals, Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, and Massachusetts Appeals Court.

Among her many professional and civic activities, Medvedow has been a member of the ABA Advisory Commission to the Standing Committee on Public Education; Governor’s Special Commission on Civic Engagement and Learning; Governor’s Commission on Sexual and Domestic Violence; Supreme Judicial Court Standing Committee on Substance Abuse; and the Massachusetts Law Review Board of Editors. She was also awarded a Wasserstein In-Residence Fellowship at Harvard Law School. She was honored with a 2017 Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly “Top Women of Law Circle of Excellence” award, was inducted into the YWCA’s Academy of Women Achievers, is a member of the Women’s Bar Foundation Emeritus Board, and currently serves as President of Congregation Dorshei Tzedek.

Medvedow received her B.A. degree, cum laude, and a M.S. in Education, from the University of Pennsylvania, and her J.D. degree from Northeastern University School of Law. Following law school, she taught for three years at Suffolk University Law School, and then served as a law clerk in the Massachusetts Appeals Court for the Honorable Raya Dreben and in the U.S. District Court for the Honorable John McNaught.