NEW YORK — LexisNexis has announced that Philip G. Schrag, a law professor at Georgetown University, was honored with the LexisNexis Matthew Bender® Daniel Levy Memorial Award for his enthusiastic advocacy on behalf of immigrant clients, his deep scholarship in immigration law and his expansive vision of justice.

The award, presented annually, commemorates the career of the late Daniel Levy, a national leader in the fields of immigration law, publishing and scholarship, and is given to the person who has shown outstanding achievement in the field.

Professor Schrag is the director of Georgetown University's asylum clinic, which has won asylum for more than 100 refugees.  He is a graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School.  Before beginning his teaching career in 1971 at Columbia University, he served as assistant counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and as the first consumer advocate of the City of New York.  He interrupted his academic work from 1977 to 1981, when he served in the Carter administration as the deputy general counsel of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.

When President Reagan was elected, Professor Schrag joined the Georgetown faculty, and for 15 years he directed a disability rights clinic.  In 1995, after a life-changing visit to the newly opened Holocaust Memorial Museum, he decided to become a refugee lawyer, and he converted the work of his Georgetown clinic to its present mission on behalf of asylum applicants.

Just then, Congress threatened the very existence of asylum by threatening to impose a 30-day statute of limitations on asylum applications, with no exceptions.  Along with Michele Pistone, Professor Schrag helped to lead the effort that resulted in a one-year deadline with several exceptions; that story of public interest lobbying is told in his 2000 book “A Well-founded Fear:  The Congressional Battle to Save Asylum in America.”

Professor Schrag has written extensively on asylum, consumer protection, nuclear arms control, clinical legal education, student financial aid, legal ethics, District of Columbia statehood and other public policy subjects.  His 13th book, written with David Ngaruri Kenney and published in May 2008 by the University of California Press, is “Asylum Denied:  A Refugee’s  Struggle for Safety in America.”

Schrag was presented with a $2,000 cash prize and an elegant crystal trophy to celebrate his work at the American Immigration Lawyers Association Annual Conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, on June 25.