Abi Hassen

Visiting Assistant Professor of Law

Abi Hassen has an extensive background in criminal defense, social movements, protest legal support, and organized labor. His scholarship involves using political philosophy as a tool for interrogating issues of race, technology, and institutional function/change. His teaching interests reflect his background in civil liberties, criminal law, technology, and philosophy. His courses at Dickinson Law include Race, Law, and Technology, Professional Responsibility, Law in Emergency, and Advocacy I.

Professor Hassen comes to Penn State Dickinson Law with over a decade of diverse experience as an attorney, organizer, and educator. He is a partner and co-founder of O’Neill and Hassen, a small practice focused on indigent federal criminal defense. He is also a co-founder Black Movement-Law Project, a non-profit dedicated to rapid response legal support. Prior to that, he was the Mass Defense Coordinator with the National Lawyers Guild, and an organizer with UNITE HERE, where he worked at the forefront of social movement and labor organizing. Throughout his professional career, Professor Hassen has been dedicated to educating lawyers, union members, and protesters on a broad variety of topics including digital surveillance, police encounters, and civil disobedience.

Abi’s scholarship takes the experiences, problems, and questions he has acquired throughout his career and uses a multi-disciplinary approach to try and develop intellectually interesting, pragmatic understandings of contemporary problems. He is particularly interested in the ways law is used to promote and/or inhibit civil society and legal institutions' capacity to discriminate. His current research uses political philosophy, and historical analysis to investigate the relationship between gangs, race, and liberalism.

Professor Hassen is an experienced public speaker and popular educator — he has given lectures, CLEs, and conducted training sessions at academic conferences, law schools, universities, in church basements, and the United Nations Human Rights Commission. Professor Hassen holds an M.A. in Political Philosophy from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, (Catalonia) Spain, a J.D. from NYU School of Law, and a B.S. (Emph., Computer Science) from The Evergreen State College.