Sarah Leberstein ’08 has been appointed associate director of the Louis Stein Center for Law and Ethics. The center sponsors scholarship and programs on ethics in law practice, including an upcoming international legal ethics conference, and oversees the Stein Scholars Program for law students seeking careers in public service.
A graduate of the Stein Scholars Program, Leberstein served on the Stein Council, was a member of the National Lawyers Guild, and was senior articles editor of the Fordham Urban Law Journal as a student. She won both the Fordham Law School Legal Writing Award and the Addison M. Metcalf Labor Law Prize. During law school, Leberstein interned with LatinoJustice PRLDEF and the Urban Justice Center’s Community Development Project. She has written extensively and spoken to a wide variety of audiences about conditions for low-wage and precarious workers and strategies for raising and enforcing labor standards.
Most recently, Leberstein worked as labor policy advisor at the Office of Labor Policy and Standards in the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs, where she helped build the office’s outreach, research, and policy programs and launched the first municipal Paid Care Division dedicated to working in partnership with workers’ rights organizations to improve the lives of domestic and home care workers.
From 2008 to 2010 she was an Equal Justice Works fellow at the National Employment Law Project in New York City. She then worked as a staff attorney and senior staff attorney at NELP from 2010 to 2016. Her work at NELP included supporting worker center and union campaigns to fight wage theft; leading a national campaign to win and implement a U.S. Department of Labor reform extending minimum wage and overtime rights to home-care workers; supporting the National Domestic Workers Alliance’s Domestic Worker Bill of Rights campaigns; and co-authoring amicus briefs on the Fair Labor Standards Act, National Labor Relations Act, home-care workers, independent contractor misclassification, and joint employment.
“I’m thrilled to be back at Fordham, working to support the next generation of public interest students as they launch their legal careers in a wide variety of fields, but all with the goal of serving the public good and advocating for the rights of those who most need their help,” Leberstein said. “I’m so pleased to be a part of this vibrant and dynamic community in my new capacity at the Stein Center.”