Featured Faculty: Judith Fox
“I became disillusioned by the way I saw the banking industry treat consumers,” says Judy Fox, associate clinical professor at Notre Dame Law School (NDLS), on why she became a lawyer. Prior to attending law school, Fox was a loan officer at banks in both Pennsylvania and Indiana. When a judge friend of hers heard her concerns, he made a bet with her. “He thought I would make a good lawyer, so he tried to talk me into taking the LSAT,” she said. “When I resisted, he offered to pay for it if I did not do well. If I did well, I would have to agree to go to law school. I did well and the rest, as they say, is history.”
As a student, Fox began working at NDLS’s Legal Aid Clinic. “Working there really determined what I would do for the rest of my career,” she said. Prior to joining the law school faculty, Fox was the deputy director of Berrien County Legal Services in St. Joseph, Michigan. “Legal Services is a great career path,” she said. “You are in the trenches working hard for the rights of the poor every day.” Fox did a lot of work on domestic violence issues, and those experiences helped her to develop and teach an experiential learning course in domestic violence. She developed the course through a grant from the Notre Dame Center for Social Concerns, and cites it as her most memorable experience as a faculty member. “At the end of the semester, the students presented me with a book they made,” she said. “Each had written a personal note about how much being in the class, working with me, and having me as a mentor had meant to them. It was a very rewarding experience.”
Over the past couple of years, Fox has turned her attention to the subprime mortgage crisis. In 2006, she began investigating the increase in mortgage foreclosures in St. Joseph County. The next year, she received a grant from Notre Dame’s Center for Social Concerns to continue the research with the City of South Bend and Notre Dame Sociology professor Rich Williams. “We are looking at foreclosures in St. Joseph County from 2000-2007 in an attempt to determine whether there are any correlations between foreclosure rates, subprime lending, and any demographic features,” says Fox. “Our data has been collected, and we hope to complete our analysis and publish the results this spring.”
For her commitment to diversity inside and outside the classroom on both a scholarly and personal level, Fox was recently awarded the Charles F. Crutchfield Faculty Member of the Year Award from the Black Law Students Association. She has incorporated cross-cultural competency into her teaching for many years, and has been researching and teaching the topic for the past five years. “Race, class, and culture play a very important part in our society,” she said. “Prejudice, although more subtle, is alive and well in America. Developing cross-cultural competency requires recognition of your own cultural identity and bias as well as that of your client.” In May, Fox will deliver a workshop on the topic at the American Association of Law Schools’ Clinical Legal Education Conference.
To learn more about Judy Fox, visit her faculty profile page.
