A leading national policy maker and a nationally recognized scholar in the field of immigration law will lead a discussion of new immigration laws during a conference today at the School of Law in Hartford.

The conference, from 9 a.m.-4 p.m. in Janet M. Blumberg Hall, is open to the public.

Judge Paul Schmidt, chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals, and Gerald Neuman, a professor of law at Columbia University School of Law, each will make a presentation and will moderate panel discussions on the new immigration statutes passed by Congress last summer. The new laws took effect this month.

Panelists are:

• Lenni Beth Benson, a professor at New York Law School and director of the Advocacy Board of the American Immigration Lawyers Association;
  
  
• Bo Cooper, assistant general counsel of the Immigration and Naturalization Service and chief of the INS Office of Asylum and Refugees;
  
  
• Maria Isabel Medina, a professor at Loyola University School of Law, where she teaches constitutional law, administrative law and employment discrimination;
  
  
• Gary Palmer, a captain in the U.S. Coast Guard and chief of the law section at the Coast Guard Academy, where he teaches cadets about implementing federal immigration policy and how to deal with migrants;
  
  
• Michael Patrick, a partner at Fragomen, Del Rey a nd Bernsen, who served as chair of the American Immigration Lawyers Association from 1993-1994, and as chair of the Immigration Law Section of the Federal Bar Association from 1989-1993;
  
  
• Michael Scaperlanda, a professor at the University of Oklahoma Law Center and former chair of the Law Teachers Committee of the Immigration Lawyers Association;
  
  
• Peter Spiro, a professor at Hofstra University School of Law, who served as International Affairs Fellow of the Counsel on Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C., from 1993-1994;
  
  
• Margaret Taylor, a professor at Wake Forest University School of Law, where she teaches immigration law, administrative law and alternative dispute resolution.

The workshop is sponsored by the Connecticut Law Review, a scholarly journal managed, edited and published by students at the law school.

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