The Commons | Faculty Focus
McAllaster leaves legacy as transformative clinician, social justice warrior, and policy advocate C
olin W. Brown Clinical Professor of Law Carolyn McAllaster retired June 30 after 31 years on the faculty, leaving a lasting legacy at Duke Law through her leadership of the Health Justice Clinic and the HIV/AIDS Policy Clinic and having helped build a policy framework and infrastructure to benefit people living with HIV and AIDS across the South. Committed to social justice throughout a career that began in private practice, she impressed on her students the importance of empathy and compassion in the practice of law. “Carolyn has been a tireless champion for persons who historically haven’t had a powerful advocate, and she has inspired multiple generations of Duke Law students to do the same,” says Dr. John Bartlett, an early clinical collaborator at Duke University Medical Center. No less significant is her impact on the Law School’s clinical program. The AIDS Legal Project (now the Health Justice Clinic) was one of the first clinics in the country focused on the legal needs of clients with HIV and AIDS when she started it in 1996, reviving clinical education at Duke Law, which now has 11 clinics. “We have some of the strongest clinics of any law school and that is largely due to the example that Carolyn set,” says Kerry Abrams, the James B. Duke and Benjamin N. Duke Dean of the School of Law and professor of law. “She’s as responsible as any-
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one for the strength of the clinical program and the Law School’s commitment to service, particularly to those who are marginalized and stigmatized.”
“The quietest radical you’ll ever meet” McAllaster, who hails from Gouverneur, New York, entered the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s four-year program in nursing but switched her interest to law as a more flexible career that would still allow her to help people. About a third of her classmates at UNC Law School were women. “We were at the beginning of the wave of women coming to law school,” McAllaster recalls. “Roe v. Wade had just been decided, and I remember Ruth Bader Ginsburg as a litigator fighting sex discrimination cases. It was an exciting time to be a woman.” After graduating with her JD in 1976 she began a practice representing plaintiffs in civil cases and defendants in criminal cases. In 1978, she co-founded the North Carolina Association of Women Attorneys, becoming its first president. “She was always very attuned to women not being treated as they should in the legal profession,” says longtime colleague and friend Jane Wettach, the William B. McGuire Clinical Professor of Law and director of the Children’s Law Clinic, who served as association
