Linda Sugin - Professor of Law

Telephone: 212-636-7866
Email: [email protected]
Office: Room 8-149
SSRN (academic papers)
Faculty page: Linda Sugin

Fordham Law School’s professionalism program reflects Linda Sugin’s vision for expanding the scope of legal education to include emotional support, leadership training, and essential skills that are not traditionally included in the law school curriculum. As Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, Sugin designed and launched the Law School’s two signature professional programs: the Peer Mentorship Program and the House System. 

The defining feature of the Peer Mentorship Program is an academic course for mentors developed and taught by Sugin and adjunct teachers under her supervision. In 2020, the instructors joined with the student affinity groups to strengthen both intra-cultural and inter-cultural mentoring and community at the law school. 

The Law School’s 2016 Strategic Plan, which focused on the student experience, imagined a House System as a central component of the Law School’s effort to build a stronger community for students. Under Sugin’s leadership, the House System has grown into an integrated support system for first-year students that engages faculty, administrators, and upper-level students. 

In addition to launching these two signature professionalism programs, Sugin overhauled the Law School’s orientation program. Under Sugin’s leadership, the August orientation for incoming students was reconceptualized to focus on professional identity development and emotional preparation for law school. These new elements of August orientation were introduced in 2018 and continue to develop. They were crafted to supplement and dovetail with the other academic-focused programs in orientation, including Quantitative Methods for Lawyers, a four-part course on quantitative tools that lawyers need to understand, which Sugin spearheaded in 2014 and continues to lead. Sugin also created a new January orientation for first-year students, first implemented in 2020, as a day focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion—a crucial component of professionalism education for law students.  In the fall of 2019, she worked with the full-time faculty to add diversity, equity, and inclusion training to full-time faculty development. Sugin also implemented mandatory diversity, equity, and inclusion training for all adjunct faculty prior to the start of the semester in fall 2020.  She chaired a committee of faculty, students, alumni and administrators to search for the Law School’s Assistant Dean of Students and Diversity and recruited Kimathi Gordon-Somers to the role in February 2020.

Recognizing the breadth of professionalism training that may benefit students, Sugin recruited new adjunct faculty to the Law School to build out the academic curriculum focused on nontraditional professional skills, professional identity formation, and professional values. As associate dean, she added new courses on transitioning from law student to lawyer, the lawyer as business advisor, diversity in law practice, positive psychology and lawyering, the job of in-house counsel, and law firm practice management. She also worked with the library to build programs and courses focused on student mastery of electronic resources and technology-based legal skills.  

In 2019, Sugin created the position of director of professionalism and recruited Jordana Confino into that role to bring wellness expertise and a greater focus on student mental health to the Law School, within the umbrella of academic affairs. Sugin and Confino collaborate closely on all aspects of the Office of Professionalism’s work.

Sugin has been on the faculty since 1994 and has taught courses in Federal Taxation, Tax Policy, Nonprofit Organizations, Corporations, Contracts, and Quantitative Methods. Sugin was the 2007 recipient of Fordham Law School’s Teacher of the Year Award and the 2021 recipient of the Dean’s Medal of Achievement. Her full faculty profile is here.
 

Recent Publications
• The Social Meaning of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, 2018 Yale L.J.F. 403
• Competitive Philanthropy: Charitable Naming Rights, Inequality, and Social Norms, 79 Ohio State L.J. 122 (2018)

Research and Teaching Areas
• Nonprofits/Charities; Tax–Individual

Courses
• Income Taxation
• Nonprofit Organizations and Philanthropy
• Tax Policy and Distributive Justice

Education
• Harvard, BA
• New York University, JD

Maya FitzGerald - Assistant Director of Professionalism

Telephone: 212-636-6888
Email: [email protected]
Office: Room 8-110