Clinical Professor of Law
Director of Clinical Education
Director, Immigrant Family Legal Clinic
- B.A. Harvard University, 1998
- J.D. Yale Law School, 2003
Nina Rabin, Clinical Professor of Law, directs UCLA Law's Immigrant Family Legal Clinic. She also currently serves as Director of UCLA's Clinical Program. In 2024, she received UCLA’s Distinguished Teaching Award. In addition to directing the Immigrant Family Legal Clinic, she has taught several intensive clinical courses in which law students have the opportunity to provide direct legal services to particularly vulnerable immigrants, including Afghan asylum-seekers and low-wage immigrant workers. Prior to joining UCLA Law in 2018, she co-directed the Immigration Law Clinic and founded a Workers' Rights Clinic at the University of Arizona's James E Rogers College of Law.
In each of the legal clinics she has developed and directed, Rabin has worked in partnership with community organizations and local institutions to best serve the multi-faceted needs of mixed status families. At the same time, she has undertaken policy research and advocacy to study and document the impact of immigration enforcement on women and families. She has authored articles and reports on the consequences of immigration enforcement for children in immigrant families, working conditions of low-wage immigrant women workers, immigrants’ parental rights, and the treatment of women fleeing gender-based violence in immigration detention. She has spoken extensively on immigration policy issues in a variety of venues, including academic conferences, community forums, and a Congressional briefing. She has also participated in trainings on immigration for attorneys, health care providers, and community leaders. Her publications have appeared in the Yale Law & Policy Review, Georgetown Immigration Law Journal, and Michigan Journal of Law Reform, among others.
Prior to her work in clinical education, Rabin clerked for the Honorable Dorothy W. Nelson on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and practiced in a civil rights law firm in California.