Who We Are

Professor Paul D. Reingold is director of the Law School's Civil Litigation Clinic. Prior to joining the law faculty in 1983, he served as a legal services attorney, specializing in cases against state and federal governments. His primary interests include civil rights litigation, appellate practice, prisoners' rights, and civil procedure. Prof. Reingold has taught trial advocacy, litigation ethics, negotiation, and clinical law, and is a past recipient of the L. Hart Wright Award for Excellence in Teaching. He also has taught as a visiting professor of law in Japan and Spain, and as a visiting clinical professor at the Boston College Law School. He has served on the board of directors of the Clinical Law Section of the American Association of Law Schools and was a founding member of the editorial board of the Clinical Law Review. Prof. Reingold attended Gerry Spence's Trial Lawyers College in Wyoming, and has been recognized as a fellow of the Michigan State Bar Foundation. He is currently chairing the executive committee of Michigan's Institute of Continuing Legal Education, and has trained to become a court-approved mediator for alternative dispute resolution. The State Bar of Michigan granted him its 2009 Champion of Justice Award for his work as a public interest lawyer. Prof. Reingold earned his BA from Amherst College and his JD from Boston University Law School.

An experienced trial lawyer, Professor Nicholas J. Rine has tried cases in a wide variety of state and federal courts and agencies. Since joining the clinical faculty in 1989, he has taught in the General Clinic, the Child Advocacy Clinic, the Urban Communities Clinic (now the Community and Economic Development Clinic), the Asylum Clinic, the Women and the Law Clinic, and the Pediatric Advocacy Clinic. He also has taught ethics and negotiation courses. In 2004, he developed a new course, Law and Development, which connects with students' volunteer work as interns in developing nations. In addition, he frequently provides training for new lawyers beginning practice in legal services programs. Prof. Rine directs the Law School's Cambodian Law and Development Program in which students from Michigan Law and other graduate programs work in Cambodia as interns with human rights NGOs and government ministries. He himself has worked in Cambodia as a consultant for a human rights NGO and has taught at the Royal University of Law and Economics and the Community Legal Education Center in Phnom Penh on a Fulbright grant. While a resident in Cambodia, he published a textbook on legal ethics in English and Khmer. Prof. Rine earned his bachelor's and law degrees from Wayne State University. He served as president of the Michigan Trial Lawyers Association from 1985 to 1986.

Professor David A. Santacroce, a clinical professor in the Michigan Clinical Law Program, teaches in the General Clinic. His primary interest is impact litigation focusing on civil rights, particularly health care issues. He is the founder and president of the Center for the Study of Applied Legal Education (CSALE), a nonprofit corporation housed at the Law School. CSALE is dedicated to the empirical study of applied legal education and the promotion of related scholarship. Using CSALE data, Prof. Santacroce provides advice to deans and faculty members at U.S. law schools on issues of clinic and externship design, pedagogy, and staffing. Prof. Santacroce is the president and founding member of Equal Justice America, a nonprofit corporation that provides grants to law students who volunteer with organizations providing civil legal services to the indigent. He is a past chair of the Association of American Law Schools' Section on Clinical Legal Education and a former board member of the Clinical Legal Education Association. He is also former senior staff attorney for the Sugar Law Center for Economic and Social Justice in Detroit. While there, he managed a programmatic worker's rights campaign under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act in trial and appellate courts throughout the United States. Prof. Santacroce received an LLM from Columbia University School of Law, where he was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar; a JD, cum laude, from Pace University School of Law, where he was managing editor of the Pace Law Review; and a BA from Connecticut College.

Professor Kimberly Thomas's research, teaching, and practice concentrate on criminal law, especially on sentencing law and practice, juvenile justice, indigent persons accused of crimes, and prisoner re-entry into the community. Prof. Thomas is the cofounder (with Professor Frank Vandervort) of the Juvenile Justice Clinic. In 2011, Prof. Thomas spent three months as a legal education expert for the ABA Rule of Law Initiative in Amman, Jordan, working on law school curriculum development, especially in criminal law, as well as the creation and support of experiential education and the first clinics in the country. In addition, she spearheaded a weeklong series of trainings for Egyptian law professors through the ABA-ROLI office in Cairo, Egypt, on clinical legal education, curriculum innovation, and moot court. Prior to joining the Law School faculty in 2003, Prof. Thomas served as a major trials attorney with Defender Association of Philadelphia. She is a magna cum laude graduate of the University of Maryland and Harvard Law School, where she was editor-in-chief of the Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review. After law school, Prof. Thomas clerked for Judge R. Guy Cole of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. During law school she worked for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, and spent time with Legal Aid of Cambodia and the Justice Committee of Parliament in Cape Town, South Africa. In addition to practicing law, she has worked as a newspaper reporter and a high school math teacher, and taught an undergraduate seminar in the economics department while she was at Harvard.