Politics & Government
Dexter Area Attorney to Lead New Law School Clinic in Ann Arbor
The Thomas M. Cooley Immigrant Civil Advocacy Clinic will launch in January.
A new law clinic benefiting students in western Washtenaw County is opening in January.
The Thomas M. Cooley Immigrant Civil Advocacy Clinic, located at 3475 Plymouth Ave. in Ann Arbor, will be run by Lima Township resident Jason Eyster.
Eyster served from 2005 to 2011 as director of the Asylum and Immigrant Rights Clinic at Ave Maria Law School in Ann Arbor and Naples, FL.
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Second- and third-year law students at Cooley Law School will gain hands-on client experience at the clinic, where law students will provide civil advocacy to immigrants, in addition to providing immigration counsel and addressing such issues as landlord-tenant disputes, unfair wage claims, and problems with immigration status.
Eyster, a graduate of Fordham Law School in New York, where he founded the Fordham International Law Journal, moved to Lima Township in the 1980s and was hired to run Ars Musica, a baroque orchestra.
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After leaving Ann Arbor in the 1980s to serve as executive director of the Princeton-in-Asia Foundation, he returned three years later and spent a decade as executive director of the Southeast Asia Business Program at the University of Michigan, and served as editor of the U of M Journal of Asian Business.
He then opened a law practice in Ann Arbor, specializing in immigration matters and political asylum. He also served as a part-time legal writing lecturer at Ave Maria Law School, where in 2005, he became director of the Asylum and Immigrant Rights Clinic.
Eyster, who speaks several languages, including Indonesian and Japanese, has worked throughout Asia, South America, Iran and Japan. In 2008 he traveled to China to help establish Peking University's School of Transnational Law.
“I’m delighted to be at Cooley Law School, a non-profit educational institution that is dedicated to making the dream of a law degree within the reach of anyone who has the self-discipline and motivation to dedicate himself to the challenge," Eyster said.
In his spare time, Eyster, his wife Diana Newman and their four children, Harold, Teddy, Athena and Artemis run a family business, Eyster Lyre Co., which has manufactured and sold more then 1,000 lyres throughout the world.
