Faculty Spotlight Shanda Sibley

Shanda Sibley has the elite credentials that one might expect of a law professor, with degrees from top-tier universities, experience with major multi-national law firms, and a clerkship with a federal appellate court.

But make no mistake, Sibley’s feet – not to mention her work – are firmly planted in the real world.

As an assistant clinical professor of law at the Sheller Center for Social Justice, Sibley created and leads the innovative Systemic Justice Clinic at Temple University Beasley School of Law and studies the criminal legal system.

While she was in a PhD program in English literature with an emphasis on marginalized people, she recalls, “It was very Ivory Tower, very theoretical, very abstract. I realized that I actually wanted to do work that had more impact on people, on actual people, but with the same focus – working on elevating problems and solutions for disadvantaged, marginalized, minoritized communities, and so decided to go to law school.”

45,000 consequences

While many schools have criminal law clinics that provide direct services, there are very few that address systemic criminal justice problems. According to Sibley, there are around 45,000 statutes formalizing restrictions on formerly incarcerated people, from voting to student loans. These create the so-called “collateral consequences” that pose challenges long after release. The Systemic Justice Clinic exists to address these collateral consequences.

“The kind of thing that we say to ourselves as a culture is we want these people to return to the straight and narrow, we want them to get their lives together, we want them to become good citizens,” she says. “And then what we do is that we create 45,000 ways to prevent them from doing that.”

Shanda Sibley

Not surprisingly, Sibley’s path to becoming a professor began as a way to solve real-life problems. She worked as an appellate public defender for New York non-profit Appellate Advocates. She recalls when clients approached her with their post-release difficulties, like having to spend a large portion of their paychecks on check cashing because they couldn’t open bank accounts.

Sibley says, “I was seeing all of these ways in which people were being stymied in their quest to do the right thing or just to move on … and so that’s what really got me started thinking about ways in which we could intervene in the space of collateral consequences.”

Macro and micro solutions

Clinic students help clients prepare for parole hearings, request fee waivers, learn about juvenile probation requirements, and more.

Sibley notes that the clinic’s work encompasses both direct representation and systemic change. “I run a hybrid model clinic where we try to do macro and micro,” she says. “We’re going to attack the systemic problem, but we’re also going to help folks now.”

For example, Sibley says incarcerated people often incur substantial fees and costs and are released in “a huge financial hole.” Unpaid fines and fees prevent people from applying for expungement, pardon, public assistance, and other benefits. The clinic not only represents individuals seeking fee waivers, but also created a website that helps people generate waiver motions they can use pro se at fee waiver hearings.

In addition to leading the clinic she founded, Sibley has a full research agenda. She describes her research interest as “administrative changes within the criminal legal system that could have huge impacts on outcomes for criminal legal defendants.” She has studied and written extensively about prosecutorial discretion as well as issues in clinical legal education.

Temple Law recently awarded Sibley one of its Research Fellowships for New Faculty to support her scholarship on academic freedom. She says much of the recent discussion around academic freedom has revolved around doctrinal professors. She believes there is a gap in addressing how the academic freedom debate affects clinical faculty, who are often the ones who deal directly with local institutions like police forces and are in the public eye. Through the fellowship, she is exploring how clinical legal faculty are affected by exclusion from certain academic freedom protections, including how they make decisions on which clinic projects to pursue and how law schools protect often non-tenured clinical faculty.

In other words, she is yet again bringing her Ivory Tower thoughtfulness to very real issues.