Jill Dutton

Gillian Dutton

Director of Externship Program and Associate Professor of Lawyering Skills

 Sullivan Hall 122

 206-398-4010

Email Gillian

AREAS OF EXPERTISE

Externship Seminars

EDUCATION

  • B.A., University of California, San Diego, cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, 1982
  • M.A., Chinese Studies, University of California, San Diego, 1985
  • J.D., Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California, Berkeley, 1988

COURSES

Transitional Justice Legal Exchange

EXTERNSHIP SEMINARS

  • Civil Externship Seminar
  • Criminal Externship Seminar
  • In-House Counsel/Government Attorney Externship Seminar
  • International Externship Seminar
  • Judicial Externship Seminar

Biography

Professor Dutton is the Director of the Externship Program and Associate Professor of Lawyering Skills at Seattle University School of Law. She is a Korematsu Center Faculty Fellow and Faculty Advisor to the International Refugee Assistance Project and the International Law Society. She teaches several externship seminars, and works and writes on clinical pedagogy, language access, civil rights and cross-cultural communication. She is co-chair of the International Committee of the AALS Clinical Section and the AALS Externship Sub-committee on International and Semester-Away Externships. Professor Dutton has an M.A. in Chinese history and is a 1988 graduate of Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California at Berkeley. She is a recipient of the 1999 Charles A. Goldmark Award for Distinguished Service and the 2005 Northwest Immigrant Rights Project Golden Door Award.

Prior to joining Seattle University, she spent fifteen years directing the Refugee and Immigrant Advocacy Project, a University of Washington Law School clinic based at the Seattle office of the Northwest Justice Project (NJP) where she was also the Senior Attorney. Before that, Professor Dutton worked at Evergreen Legal Services in Yakima, Washington where she represented Spanish-speaking migrant farm workers in housing and public entitlements cases.

Professor Dutton is a national expert on language access on the law. Her work on language access began in her early years as a lawyer and includes negotiating a class action consent decree with Washington State Department of Social and Health Services, founding and serving on the board of the Washington State Coalition for Language Access, participating in the Washington State Inter-Agency LEP Workgroup, and assisting in numerous efforts at the state and national level to improve language access in courts, agencies and organizations. From August 2010 to February 2012 she served as a consultant for the American Bar Association on a project to draft ABA Standards for Language Access in Courts. Having lived abroad several times, she speaks Spanish, French, German and Mandarin.

Publications

Externship Pedagogy and Practice, Carolina Academic Press (2023).

International Experiences: A Path to Critical Legal Skills, Values, and Innovation for American Law Students (2020).

Promoting Language Access in the Legal Academy. University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender & Class, Spring 2013. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2249798

The Washington State Coalition for Language Access: How coalitions can help legal services attorneys improve access for their Limited English Proficient (LEP) clients. Clearinghouse Review, Vol. 43, (Mar - Apr, 2009)

A Brief History of the Washington State Coalition for Language Access. Washington State Minority and Justice Commission Equal Justice Commission Newsletter, Vol. 12 No. June 2008.

Working Effectively with Limited English Proficient Clients: How Good Interpreter and Translation Services Can Improve Our Advocacy for Clients, ABA Commission on Domestic Violence E-newsletter Spring 2008, Vol. 10.

The Effect of Welfare on Immigrant Children, Clearinghouse Review, Vol. 2, pp. 503-517. (Jan-Feb 1999)