Leah A. Plunkett

Leah A. Plunkett is Associate Professor of Legal Skills & Director of Academic Success at the University of New Hampshire School of Law and does research with the Student Privacy Initiative. Leah has a long-standing commitment to education and education law.  From 2011-2013, she was a Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School, where she taught first-year legal research and writing and worked on her own legal scholarship.  Previously, she established and served as the first directing Staff Attorney of the Youth Law Project at New Hampshire Legal Assistance.  The Youth Law Project represents low-income and at-risk youth—many of whom are facing criminal charges—in school discipline, special education, and related cases.  She also worked as a Staff Attorney at the National Consumer Law Center in Boston, where she promoted policies, regulations, and laws that advance economic security for low-income and vulnerable populations. Leah’s scholarly interests take as a starting point the types of situations she saw kids and families face while she was in practice.  Typically, these involved intertwined issues of criminal, family, education, or consumer law.  Her research focuses on the unexpected—and sometimes unwelcome—ways that people find themselves entangled with the criminal justice system in the course of ordinary family life.  She is particularly interested in the way these entanglements manifest themselves for low and middle-income individuals and families.