Beth Lyon

Clinical Professor of Law

Contact Information

Cornell Law School
156 Hughes Hall
Ithaca, NY 14853-4901

Phone: (607) 254-4638
Fax: (607) 255-7193
Email: mbl235@cornell.edu

Assistant:
Susan Tosto
Cornell Law School
129 Hughes Hall
Ithaca, NY 14853-4901
Email: sjt29@cornell.edu

Professional Biography

Beth Lyon is a Clinical Professor of Law and founder of Cornell’s Farmworker’s Legal Assistance Clinic. She is a national authority on the laws and policies affecting immigrant workers. She has written extensively on domestic and international immigrant and farm worker rights, and generally about the human rights of the poor. Her publications are widely cited in academic and practitioner publications, and she has been quoted in various news media outlets. She is also a frequent speaker and panelist for academic and bar association conferences, speaking both about policy questions and also about practical issues of lawyering through interpreters and providing legal services to rural minorities.

Professor Lyon previously taught at Villanova Law School, where she was the founding Director of the Farmworker Legal Aid Clinic, founding Co-Director of the Community Interpreter Internship Program, and Professor of Law. Prior to that, she was a staff attorney for Human Rights First, a consultant at the D.C. Coalition Against Domestic Violence and the Center on Housing Rights and Evictions, and the recipient of a three year teaching fellowship at the International Human Rights Clinic at Washington College of Law, American University.

She is a member of the Advisory Group of the American Bar Association Language Access Standards Project, Co-Chair of the Human Rights Committee of the Society of American Law Teachers Board of Directors, and Praxis Coordinator for the Steering Committee of the Board of Directors of Latina & Latino Critical Theory, Inc. She also serves on the Board of Directors for the Global Workers Justice Alliance, a non-profit agency that trains and assists advocates whose clients have returned to Mexico and Guatemala.

Professor Lyon received her B.A. from University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, her M.S. from Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, and her J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center. While at Georgetown, she was the managing editor of Law and Policy in International Business (since renamed Georgetown Journal of International Law) and a Ford Foundation Fellow, working in Lima, Peru for the Comisión Andina de Juristas.