María Pabón

María Mercedes Pabón is an expert in immigrants’ rights, immigration law  and diversity/multicultural matters in the legal profession. She also focuses her research on issues concerning Latinos, families, race and the law, and the status of women lawyers. Her book Presumed Incompetent, is a study of the lives of undocumented students in the U.S, and in her scholarship she has studied many other topics that affect the lives of women, BIPOC and immigrants in the U.S. and abroad.

María served as Dean of Loyola University New Orleans College of Law from 2011 – 2015, and she is currently a professor there. She created a course Diversity in the Legal Profession, which she teaches regularly, as well as Immigration, Family Law, Street Law and Lawyering courses.  She was the first woman law dean in the state of Louisiana and the first Puerto Rican to serve as dean of a law school in the mainland United States. She is a member of the American Law Institute and serves on the board of the Association of Latinx Princeton Alumni.

Maria graduated from Princeton University in 1985. While at Princeton, María was a Religion major who was active in Acción Puertorriqueña y Amigos, the Aquinas Institute, and Theatre Intime. She was part of the Teacher Preparation Program at Princeton University and has taught numerous courses in the U.S. and abroad. She has taught at the University of Puerto Rico, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, Spain, lectured at Universidad Latina in Panama, the Hungarian Service University in Budapest, and the University of Lisbon. She is also an adjunct faculty member for Columbia Teachers College, teaching a course in Law and Ethics every summer in its Summer Principals Academy in New Orleans.

A graduate of University of Pennsylvania School of Law, Pabón currently serves as president of the Hispanic Lawyers Association of Louisiana and is an Access to Justice Fellow of the Louisiana State Bar, handling pro bono immigration cases for Catholic Charities. While in law school, Maria was a Legal Writing Instructor and a member of the University Pennsylvania Law Review. She was also active in the Hispanic Law Students Association and served on the Student Faculty Sexual Harassment Committee.

Related Sessions

View full schedule