Our Team

Paula Galowitz

For over two decades, Professor Paula Galowitz has concentrated her teaching, scholarship, and bar association work on improving legal services for the indigent. Today, she is widely known both as a clinical teacher and as an expert on civil legal services for indigent clients.

A graduate of Brooklyn Law School, Galowitz clerked for Judge Jacob D. Fuchsberg of the New York State Court of Appeals before joining the Civil Division of the New York Legal Aid Society. In 1980, she came to NYU School of Law. Professor Galowitz teaches in the Medical-Legal Advocacy Clinic, a clinic which employs a multidisciplinary and holistic approach to provide legal advocacy in a medical setting for clients referred by medical professionals. This clinic is a medical-legal collaboration to improve health outcomes for patients/clients by providing on-site legal advocacy assistance and training to medical providers. a field work clinic that represents indigents in a wide variety of matters involving housing, government benefits, family law, immigration, education, and AIDS-related matters. She also teaches a simulated course on civil litigation and a seminar on Professional Responsibility in the Public Interest.

Galowitz is currently on the Board of Directors of the Clinical Legal Education Association (CLEA) and was Co-Chair of the Task Force on Housing Court of the New York County Lawyers’ Association. She has previously been chair of the Committee of the Housing Court of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York and chair of the Committee on Legal Services, an organization of law professors working to improve the delivery of civil legal services.

Galowitz sees her Bar Association work as connected intimately to her work as an educator. “Given the retrenchment in the funding available for civil legal services,” she says, “we have an affirmative responsibility as members of a legal profession committed to pro bono work and systemic reform to work with the practicing bar to help those most sorely in need.”