Leah Plunkett

Leah A. Plunkett does research with the Student Privacy Initiative.  She focuses on the role consent plays as schools transition student data to the "cloud."  Leah is also the Interim Director of Academic Success and Visiting Assistant Professor of Legal Skills at the University of New Hampshire School of Law. 

Leah has a long-standing commitment to education and education law.  From 2011-2013, she was a Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School, where she taught first-year legal research and writing and worked on her own legal scholarship.  Previously, she established and served as the first directing Staff Attorney of the Youth Law Project at New Hampshire Legal Assistance.  The Youth Law Project represents low-income and at-risk youth—many of whom are facing criminal charges—in school discipline, special education, and related cases.  She also worked as a Staff Attorney at the National Consumer Law Center in Boston, where she promoted policies, regulations, and laws that advance economic security for low-income and vulnerable populations.  Leah served as a law clerk for Hon. Catherine C. Blake in the United States District Court for the District of Maryland for the 2006-2007 term.

Leah's scholarly interests take as a starting point the types of situations she saw kids and families face while she was in practice.  Typically, these involved intertwined issues of criminal, family, education, or consumer law.  Her research focuses on the unexpected—and sometimes unwelcome—ways that people find themselves entangled with the criminal justice system in the course of ordinary family life.  She is particularly interested in the way these entanglements manifest themselves for low and middle-income individuals and families.

Leah holds a J.D., cum laude, from Harvard Law School, where she was a student-attorney at and board member of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau.   She also has an A.B., summa cum laude, from Harvard College in American History & Literature, where she spent much of her time happily making up stories and singing off-key with the Immediate Gratification Players improv comedy troupe.