While a student in the Lawyering in the Digital Age clinic in law school, I had the pleasure of working on the incipient "collateral consequences calculator" which was being developed collaboratively by Columbia Law School, the Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning, and Hon. Judith S. Kaye, Chief Judge of the State of New York. The calculator has now launched and is available to the public today at http://calculator.law.columbia.edu.

The calculator lets legal practitioners, judges, and other interested parties determine the immigration and public housing eligibility consequences that follow from a guilty plea or conviction in New York courts. The importance of this project has been underscored by the recent Supreme Court decision in Padilla v. Kentucky, which held that criminal defense lawyers must advise their clients about the immigration consequences of criminal charges and that failure to do so amounts to the ineffective assistance of counsel.

More information about the Collateral Consequences Calculator is available in a Columbia press release and in the New York Law Journal article embedded below:

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For a related project, I re-designed and curated a blog entitled Four Cs, which catalogs news, cases, statutes/regulations policies, and articles about the collateral consequences of criminal charges.