Stephen Paskey

From 2009 to 2023, Stephen Paskey was a lecturer in the School of Law’s Legal Research and Writing (LAWR) program. He returned to the law school in the fall of 2024 after 36 weeks of travel to 15 countries on five continents. In addition to teaching LAWR and Advanced LAWR, he has also taught legal drafting to students at UB Law, and has remotely taught both contract drafting and practical business English to law students in Ukraine.

Before embarking upon a teaching career, Paskey worked for 12 years as a litigating attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., entering the Justice Department through the Attorney General’s Honors Program.

After working with the former Immigration and Naturalization Service, he served for nine years as a senior trial attorney in the Office of Special Investigations, a unit that investigated and prosecuted U.S. residents who assisted in Nazi-sponsored persecution during World War II. From 2004 to 2007, Paskey was the lead attorney on the government’s deportation case against John Demjanjuk, who was deported to Germany for serving as an armed guard at the Sobibor extermination camp. In November 2008, Paskey received the Assistant Attorney General's Award for Human Rights Law Enforcement.

Paskey graduated with honors from the University of Maryland School of Law in 1994, where he was elected to the Order of the Coif. From 1994 to 1995, he clerked for Hon. Arrie W. Davis on the Maryland Court of Special Appeals.

Paskey's scholarly interests involve the relationship between law, legal practice, and narrative theory. In October 2017, he received the Penny Pether Award for Law & Language Scholarship for his article "Telling Refugee Stories: Trauma, Credibility, and the Adversarial Adjudication of Claims for Asylum."