Suzanne E. Tomkins

Suzanne Tomkins is a trailblazer, a consensus-builder, a model advocate and a gifted educator. She changed the landscape for domestic violence victims locally while also impacting legal responses throughout the country and in Ukraine, Russia and Brazil. She always saw the next issue to be addressed before others recognized it. As co-director of the Family Law Program, she ensured that new lawyers addressed intimate partner violence whenever it was present in family law matters. The ripples of her work are wide and deep.

Tomkins and Dr. Catherine Cerulli started the Domestic Violence Task Force as law students at SUNY Buffalo Law School in 1990, and Tomkins served as its faculty adviser for over 20 years. The task force has provided advocacy in Family Court in collaboration with Haven House (the local battered women’s shelter) and the Erie County Bar’s Volunteer Lawyers Project.

Tomkins and Cerulli started the Women, Children and Social Justice Clinic (formerly the Family Violence Clinic) in 1992. Students obtained a practice order to assist local prosecutors, victims seeking protective orders, victims in matrimonial and custody matters and immigrants who self-petition for relief under VAWA.

Tomkins and Cerulli co-supervised students in groundbreaking empirical research and evaluation of intervention models. Protocols developed by the clinic with partners in Niagara County, N.Y., became a model for protocols in several other New York counties. Recently, the clinic created a searchable online database identifying emergency animal shelters for victims who could not take their pets with them into shelter, overcoming a barrier to victim safety. The clinic joined forces with other law schools in a campaign to recognize domestic violence as a human rights violation. Tomkins worked with the Community and Economic Development and Housing Clinics and the YWCA of Niagara to address the economic underpinnings of violence. They collaborated to build Carolyn’s House, a comprehensive housing program for homeless women and children in Niagara Falls, N.Y., virtually all of whom have been victims of intimate partner violence.

In January 2011 in Orchard Park, N.Y., Dr. Muzzamil Hassan killed his wife, Assiya, while his children waited in the parking lot of their TV station.

Tomkins and clinic co-director Remla Parthasarathy led the communication effort of the local domestic violence community so that it was a strong, informed and unified voice.

Tomkins led a similar communication and education effort when the local district attorney announced that he would no longer prosecute misdemeanors and violations in the Integrated Domestic Violence Court, calling the court a “failed experiment.” Tomkins educated the public about the dangerousness of low-level offenses in the cycle of violence. Under court order, the cases were resumed.

Tomkins was sponsored by the American Bar Association’s Rule of Law Project to travel to Russia to educate attorneys, judges and law enforcement officials. She did similar work in Ukraine. For six years, one or two feminist- practicing attorneys from Central and Eastern European countries came to study with Professor Isabel Marcus and Tomkins. Prosecutors from Brazil also studied in Tomkins’ clinic, and she went to Brazil as their offices began to prosecute cases under the first laws criminalizing domestic violence in Brazil.

Tomkins’ work through the Women, Children and Social Justice Clinic changed the response to intimate partner violence in our community. By training the next generation of advocates here and around the world, her work will have infinite and endless impact.