Deborah Anker


Deborah Eve Anker is an American Professor of Law and Director of the Harvard Law School Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program, which she co-founded in 1984. The HIRC is a clinical and academic program that engages students in representation, and teaches institutional context, legal doctrine and theory. She has been a Harvard academic for over 35 years. Anker is the author of the treatise, Law of Asylum in the United States, and she has co-drafted gender asylum guidelines and amicus curiae briefs. Her scholarly work on asylum is widely cited, frequently by international and domestic courts and tribunals, including the United States Supreme Court.
In 2014 the First Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a Board of Immigration Appeals decision denying asylum to a Guatemalan Mayan Quiche Indian, for which the HIRC wrote a brief. In August of the same year, the Board of Immigration Appeals recognized domestic violence as grounds for seeking asylum in the US, with Anker and the HIRC having written the amicus brief in that decision, in the case of Matter of A-R-C-G-. In June 2015, Anker received the Arthur C. Helton Human Rights Award from the American Immigration Lawyers Association "in recognition of outstanding service in advancing the cause of human rights".
She graduated magna cum laude from Brandeis University, and received a J.D. from the Northeastern University Law School. She also has a Master of Law degree and Master of Arts and Teaching degree from Harvard. She is a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation.
Her father, Irving Anker, was a New York City Schools Chancellor during desegregation. Her mother, Sara R. Anker, was a history teacher at Martin Van Buren High School in Queens Village. Deborah Anker married Alan Nogee and has a son with him, named Philip Anker-Nogee.

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