By Bob Needham
Michigan Law
Paulina Arnold, an expert on civil detention, has joined the Michigan Law faculty Arnold worked with detained migrant parents directly after college, and that drove her desire to go to law school. After graduating and two years of clerking, she worked as a movement lawyer, partially on detention issues. And now, as a law professor, civil detention is a primary focus of her research.
Arnold brings her expertise on immigration detention and related issues—including constitutional law, habeas, and prison law—to Michigan Law this fall, as she joins the faculty as an assistant professor.
Arnold became involved with detention issues while working in Queens, New York, for a legal nonprofit that did family defense with immigrant parents. Often, those parents were in immigration detention, incarcerated under family court orders of protection, or civilly committed.
“The more direct work that I did, the more I realized that the law is kind of a hard stop on people’s lives,” Arnold said. “So I originally went to law school to be a direct services lawyer.”
She remained active in immigration and detention issues as a student at Harvard Law School. She worked with the Bronx Defenders, the ACLU of Southern California, and a variety of clinics and community organizations, learning more about the legal structures surrounding prolonged detention in criminal jails and immigration detention facilities.
After clerkships on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, Arnold took a movement lawyer position at CASA, a grassroots immigrant advocacy organization that is funded through the membership fees of the people who it’s advocating alongside—typically low-income, working-class immigrants.
With the wide range of services offered at CASA, “I wore a lot of different hats,” Arnold said. “I was a combination employment law, labor law, and immigration law attorney, while also advising on litigation and legislative advocacy.”
Eventually, a pivot to academia felt like a natural next step.
“I’m really interested in the coercive power of the law and how the law shapes people’s lives,” she said. “At the same time, I loved law school. I loved the classes, and I loved getting deep into the logic and patterns of the law. The more that I worked and got a practical grounding in the law, the more I felt like there was a gap in the scholarship in the immigration world and in the prison space about civil confinement. It’s an area of law that has an enormous impact on thousands of people’s lives but can be under-theorized in the academy.”
Arnold’s first foray into an academic career came as a Forrester Fellow at Tulane University Law School, where she published on the relationship between immigration detention and other forms of civil detention in the Stanford Law Review. But before coming to Michigan Law, she had one more avenue to explore: clerking for Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. “It’s a way to dip a toe in generalist law and see resonances that you might not have seen before,” Arnold said of her High Court experience. “It gave me a different perspective on my scholarship. Working for Justice Sotomayor is an incredible experience and an enormous honor. It was an exciting year to clerk, and I think it’s going to make my scholarship better.”
Arnold says a number of factors attracted her to Michigan, including a large number of faculty working in her areas of interest, such as immigration, habeas, and prison law.
“There’s a phenomenal set of faculty at the Law School,” she said. “My scholarship focuses on civil confinement, which is an aspect of law that touches many others, so I’m excited to start those conversations across different areas of the law. In addition, Michigan has such a strong reputation for public service, and among its students and alumni. Everybody I meet from Michigan seems to have had a wonderful time at the school.”
Arnold is excited to get back to her scholarship, and to prepare to teach Civil Procedure in the spring.
“I look at Civil Procedure as about the power of courts, which is a similar theme throughout my scholarship. When you think you have all these rights on paper, can you get a court to do anything about it? You have to teach a lot of rules alongside a lot of concepts, but I’m looking forward to getting students excited about both.”
Most of all, she looks forward to becoming part of the Michigan Law community. “I’m excited to meet the students and to return to faculty workshops. After a year clerking for the Court, I can’t wait to see what everybody has been thinking about and working on.”
Albert Pak, who is dedicated to supporting community groups, has also joined the Michigan Law faculty.
The value of education and helping community organizations are two common themes in Albert Pak’s life. When he found the opportunity to combine those interests at Michigan Law and in Detroit, the decision to jump from private practice to academia was made.
Pak joins the Michigan Law faculty this fall, working in the Community Enterprise Clinic. Although he comes to the faculty from private practice, the things that appeal to him most about academia have long been a part of his career.
Shortly after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, Pak helped launch 12 Plus, a nonprofit that provides post-secondary pathway assistance to high school students in underserved areas of Philadelphia.
“I have always had a passion for education,” Pak said. “At 12 Plus, I enjoyed giving my students the tools they needed to prepare for life beyond 12th grade. Increasing access to opportunity was and continues to be a very meaningful pursuit,” Pak said. “So after law school, I always had it in the back of my mind to return to academia in some form or another to be able to work with students.”
First, though, Pak had some other avenues to explore. While in graduate school, he spent a summer interning with the philanthropy arm of a large Detroit-based corporation, focusing on education issues in the city. “I was given a window into a lot of what was happening in the city—I witnessed a wide range of needs, how some of those needs were being met, and the challenges ahead,” he said.
Then, after graduating from law school at the University of Pennsylvania—and earning a master’s degree from Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs, both in 2018—Pak won a prestigious Skadden Fellowship. Based on his previous experience in Detroit, he proposed a program for under-resourced entrepreneurs, small businesses, and nonprofits in the city to receive quality legal support.
He spent two years with the nonprofit Michigan Community Resources, building out a program to help provide pro bono legal assistance.
In 2021, Pak joined Bodman PLC in Ann Arbor, working with foundations and other nonprofits on a variety of legal issues. In 2023, he received the American Bar Association’s Outstanding Nonprofit Lawyer of the Year (Young Lawyer) Award.
“When I was invited to join the Law School, which happens to be right in my backyard, and to work in the Community Enterprise Clinic, it was an easy decision,” Pak said.
“Having worked as a public interest attorney through the Skadden Fellowship in Detroit, helping in many ways the same client population that the clinic assists, I viewed this opportunity as a serendipitous coming together of many different parts of my life.”
Pak joins the Michigan Law faculty as a clinical assistant professor, and he will work in the Community Enterprise Clinic with Director Dana Thompson, ’99.
“The focus of the Community Enterprise Clinic is to work with neighborhood-based organizations, from nonprofits to small businesses,” Pak said. “The clinic’s mission builds on the work I did both as a Skadden Fellow and as a nonprofit and business attorney at Bodman. It’s an honor to reconnect with these community-based organizations and assist them in this way.
“Throughout my career, I have seen the often unsung and underappreciated impact that nonprofits, small businesses, and other neighborhood-based organizations have in the community in advancing equity, being a voice for the marginalized, and providing much-needed services,” he continued. “I believe that providing legal assistance and other core professional services to help them succeed is of utmost importance not only to the communities they serve but also to the region as a whole. I’m excited to be working for a clinic that is devoted to supporting these community-based organizations.”
Beyond his work with the clinic, Pak has other goals as an incoming faculty member, including contributing to the positive culture at the Law School and supporting faculty and staff colleagues in their endeavors.
But most of all, he looks forward to helping students.
For example, he hopes to assist students who are interested in public interest fellowships and public interest careers in general.
“I’m also currently the vice president of the Michigan Asian Pacific American Bar Association, and I’d love to connect current law students with the greater statewide Asian Pacific American legal community,” he added.
“My goal is for every student who steps into the clinic to develop their legal skills as well as to gain a deeper appreciation of the city of Detroit and other cities from which we draw our clients. My hope is that by better understanding what our clients mean to and for the city, the students will recognize the impact they are making through their work, and, as a result, counsel with greater purpose and conviction.”
Michigan Law
Paulina Arnold, an expert on civil detention, has joined the Michigan Law faculty Arnold worked with detained migrant parents directly after college, and that drove her desire to go to law school. After graduating and two years of clerking, she worked as a movement lawyer, partially on detention issues. And now, as a law professor, civil detention is a primary focus of her research.
Arnold brings her expertise on immigration detention and related issues—including constitutional law, habeas, and prison law—to Michigan Law this fall, as she joins the faculty as an assistant professor.
Arnold became involved with detention issues while working in Queens, New York, for a legal nonprofit that did family defense with immigrant parents. Often, those parents were in immigration detention, incarcerated under family court orders of protection, or civilly committed.
“The more direct work that I did, the more I realized that the law is kind of a hard stop on people’s lives,” Arnold said. “So I originally went to law school to be a direct services lawyer.”
She remained active in immigration and detention issues as a student at Harvard Law School. She worked with the Bronx Defenders, the ACLU of Southern California, and a variety of clinics and community organizations, learning more about the legal structures surrounding prolonged detention in criminal jails and immigration detention facilities.
After clerkships on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, Arnold took a movement lawyer position at CASA, a grassroots immigrant advocacy organization that is funded through the membership fees of the people who it’s advocating alongside—typically low-income, working-class immigrants.
With the wide range of services offered at CASA, “I wore a lot of different hats,” Arnold said. “I was a combination employment law, labor law, and immigration law attorney, while also advising on litigation and legislative advocacy.”
Eventually, a pivot to academia felt like a natural next step.
“I’m really interested in the coercive power of the law and how the law shapes people’s lives,” she said. “At the same time, I loved law school. I loved the classes, and I loved getting deep into the logic and patterns of the law. The more that I worked and got a practical grounding in the law, the more I felt like there was a gap in the scholarship in the immigration world and in the prison space about civil confinement. It’s an area of law that has an enormous impact on thousands of people’s lives but can be under-theorized in the academy.”
Arnold’s first foray into an academic career came as a Forrester Fellow at Tulane University Law School, where she published on the relationship between immigration detention and other forms of civil detention in the Stanford Law Review. But before coming to Michigan Law, she had one more avenue to explore: clerking for Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. “It’s a way to dip a toe in generalist law and see resonances that you might not have seen before,” Arnold said of her High Court experience. “It gave me a different perspective on my scholarship. Working for Justice Sotomayor is an incredible experience and an enormous honor. It was an exciting year to clerk, and I think it’s going to make my scholarship better.”
Arnold says a number of factors attracted her to Michigan, including a large number of faculty working in her areas of interest, such as immigration, habeas, and prison law.
“There’s a phenomenal set of faculty at the Law School,” she said. “My scholarship focuses on civil confinement, which is an aspect of law that touches many others, so I’m excited to start those conversations across different areas of the law. In addition, Michigan has such a strong reputation for public service, and among its students and alumni. Everybody I meet from Michigan seems to have had a wonderful time at the school.”
Arnold is excited to get back to her scholarship, and to prepare to teach Civil Procedure in the spring.
“I look at Civil Procedure as about the power of courts, which is a similar theme throughout my scholarship. When you think you have all these rights on paper, can you get a court to do anything about it? You have to teach a lot of rules alongside a lot of concepts, but I’m looking forward to getting students excited about both.”
Most of all, she looks forward to becoming part of the Michigan Law community. “I’m excited to meet the students and to return to faculty workshops. After a year clerking for the Court, I can’t wait to see what everybody has been thinking about and working on.”
Albert Pak, who is dedicated to supporting community groups, has also joined the Michigan Law faculty.
The value of education and helping community organizations are two common themes in Albert Pak’s life. When he found the opportunity to combine those interests at Michigan Law and in Detroit, the decision to jump from private practice to academia was made.
Pak joins the Michigan Law faculty this fall, working in the Community Enterprise Clinic. Although he comes to the faculty from private practice, the things that appeal to him most about academia have long been a part of his career.
Shortly after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, Pak helped launch 12 Plus, a nonprofit that provides post-secondary pathway assistance to high school students in underserved areas of Philadelphia.
“I have always had a passion for education,” Pak said. “At 12 Plus, I enjoyed giving my students the tools they needed to prepare for life beyond 12th grade. Increasing access to opportunity was and continues to be a very meaningful pursuit,” Pak said. “So after law school, I always had it in the back of my mind to return to academia in some form or another to be able to work with students.”
First, though, Pak had some other avenues to explore. While in graduate school, he spent a summer interning with the philanthropy arm of a large Detroit-based corporation, focusing on education issues in the city. “I was given a window into a lot of what was happening in the city—I witnessed a wide range of needs, how some of those needs were being met, and the challenges ahead,” he said.
Then, after graduating from law school at the University of Pennsylvania—and earning a master’s degree from Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs, both in 2018—Pak won a prestigious Skadden Fellowship. Based on his previous experience in Detroit, he proposed a program for under-resourced entrepreneurs, small businesses, and nonprofits in the city to receive quality legal support.
He spent two years with the nonprofit Michigan Community Resources, building out a program to help provide pro bono legal assistance.
In 2021, Pak joined Bodman PLC in Ann Arbor, working with foundations and other nonprofits on a variety of legal issues. In 2023, he received the American Bar Association’s Outstanding Nonprofit Lawyer of the Year (Young Lawyer) Award.
“When I was invited to join the Law School, which happens to be right in my backyard, and to work in the Community Enterprise Clinic, it was an easy decision,” Pak said.
“Having worked as a public interest attorney through the Skadden Fellowship in Detroit, helping in many ways the same client population that the clinic assists, I viewed this opportunity as a serendipitous coming together of many different parts of my life.”
Pak joins the Michigan Law faculty as a clinical assistant professor, and he will work in the Community Enterprise Clinic with Director Dana Thompson, ’99.
“The focus of the Community Enterprise Clinic is to work with neighborhood-based organizations, from nonprofits to small businesses,” Pak said. “The clinic’s mission builds on the work I did both as a Skadden Fellow and as a nonprofit and business attorney at Bodman. It’s an honor to reconnect with these community-based organizations and assist them in this way.
“Throughout my career, I have seen the often unsung and underappreciated impact that nonprofits, small businesses, and other neighborhood-based organizations have in the community in advancing equity, being a voice for the marginalized, and providing much-needed services,” he continued. “I believe that providing legal assistance and other core professional services to help them succeed is of utmost importance not only to the communities they serve but also to the region as a whole. I’m excited to be working for a clinic that is devoted to supporting these community-based organizations.”
Beyond his work with the clinic, Pak has other goals as an incoming faculty member, including contributing to the positive culture at the Law School and supporting faculty and staff colleagues in their endeavors.
But most of all, he looks forward to helping students.
For example, he hopes to assist students who are interested in public interest fellowships and public interest careers in general.
“I’m also currently the vice president of the Michigan Asian Pacific American Bar Association, and I’d love to connect current law students with the greater statewide Asian Pacific American legal community,” he added.
“My goal is for every student who steps into the clinic to develop their legal skills as well as to gain a deeper appreciation of the city of Detroit and other cities from which we draw our clients. My hope is that by better understanding what our clients mean to and for the city, the students will recognize the impact they are making through their work, and, as a result, counsel with greater purpose and conviction.”
