Esme Caramello

2012-2013 Academic Year

Lecturer on Law

Deputy Director and Clinical Instructor, Harvard Legal Aid Bureau

Research Interests

• Clinical Legal Education
• Delivery of Legal Services/Access to Justice
• Housing Law and Policy

Education

• Harvard-Radcliffe College B.A. 1994, Social Anthropology
• Harvard Law School J.D. 1999

Appointments

• Clinical Instructor, 2006
• Deputy Director, Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, 2009
• Lecturer on Law, 2009

Practice Information

Ms. Caramello's work at the Legal Aid Bureau includes eviction defense litigation, including housing preservation for tenants and homeowners after foreclosure and pursuit of tenants' rights to fair, safe and affordable housing, as well as Social Security disability and unemployment insurance appeals. Working with Bureau students, Ms. Caramello served as counsel for the homeowner in the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court case of Bank of New York v. Bailey, which preserved homeowners' rights to assert defects in the foreclosure process as defenses in their post-foreclosure eviction cases. She and her students also represent homeowners in the pending Supreme Judicial Court cases of Eaton v. FNMA, which challenges a bank's right to foreclose when it is not the holder of the borrower's promissory note, and FNMA v. Hendricks, which seeks to enforce statutory protections for homeowners post-foreclosure. Before joining the Bureau, Ms. Caramello was a Visiting Assistant Clinical Professor of Law at Suffolk Law School, a Clinical Instructor at the WilmerHale Legal Services Center, a Chesterfield Smith Community Service Fellow in the Boston office of Holland & Knight, and a commercial litigator at two international law firms. In 2000 and 2001, she was law clerk to the Honorable Charles P. Kocoras on the United States District Court in Chicago.

Additional Information

Ms. Caramello will co-teach, with David Grossman, the course Introduction to Advocacy: Skills and Ethics in Clinical Practice, and the Advanced Clinical Practice workshop in both the Fall 2012 and Spring 2013 terms. They will also co-teach the course Housing Law and Policy in the Spring term.

Representative Publications

• Caramello, Esme & Rafael Mares. "Tenants Facing Foreclosure" in Legal Tactics: Tenants' Rights in Massachusetts (Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, 2008).
  
• Caramello, Esme. "Rent" in Legal Tactics: Tenants' Rights in Massachusetts (Massachsuetts Law Reform Institute, 2008).
  

Bibliography

View bibliography