Gillian Dutton

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.