Professor Patience Crowder joined the DU faculty in 2010 to create and teach the Community Economic Development Clinic. Prior to joining the faculty, she was the Wellspring Assistant Clinical Professor of Law at Tulsa College of Law, where she formed and taught a transactional legal clinic. She began her career in the legal academy as a Clinical Fellow in the Community Development Clinic at the University of Baltimore School of Law after working in Sacramento, California, as the business development manager of a nonprofit corporation that works to revitalize an inner-city neighborhood through economic development and public education. She began her legal career as a bank finance associate with Shearman & Sterling in San Francisco, California. Her scholarship examines the impact of contract, corporate, and local government law in transactional advocacy for the public interest, particularly the revitalization of inner-city and underserved communities. Her articles have been published by the Tennessee Law Review, the Journal of Affordable Housing & Community Development Law (reprint), and the Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law & Policy. She earned her J.D. from Rutgers School of Law – Newark, where she was an Articles Editor of the Rutgers Law Review. She received her B.A. in Sociology from Georgetown University.

Featured Publications

• Transactional Community Lawyering: Introducing Denver Law’s New Community Economic Development Clinic , DULR Online: The Online Supplement to the Denver University Law Review (2011).
• More than Merely Incidental: Third-Party Beneficiary Rights in Urban Redevelopment Contracts, 17 Geo. J. Poverty L. & Pol’y 287 (2010).
• Ain’t No Sunshine: Examining Informality and State Open Meeting Acts as the Anti-public Norm in Inner-City Redevelopment Deal Making, 74 Tenn. L. Rev. 623 (2007) reprinted in 18 J. Aff. Housing & Comm. Dev. Law (2008).