B.A., Stanford University
J.D, Columbia Law School; Harlan Fiske Stone scholar

Dale Margolin Cecka joins the faculty of Albany Law as an Assistant Professor of Law and Director of the Family Violence Litigation Clinic. Prior to this appointment, Prof. Cecka was a Clinical Professor of Law and the Founder and Director of the Family Law Clinic at the University of Richmond School of Law from 2008-2018. After relocating to Atlanta in 2018, Prof. Cecka served as an Assistant Attorney General for the State of Georgia and as a Senior Staff Attorney for the Cobb County Superior Court, as well in private family law practice.  

From 2004-2006, Prof. Cecka was a Skadden Fellow at the Legal Aid Society of New York, where she advocated for pregnant and parenting teenagers and adolescents aging out of foster care, primarily in the Bronx Family Court. At the end of her Skadden Fellowship, Prof. Cecka was awarded a Clinical Teaching Fellowship at St. John's University School of Law, and served as the Interim Director of the Child Advocacy Clinic, where she represented children in all five boroughs of New York as well as in Nassau Family Court.

Prof. Cecka's scholarship focuses on the constitutional rights of parents and inequities in the child welfare and family court systems.  Her articles have appeared in the Catholic University Law Review, the University of South Carolina Law School and the West Virginia University Law School, among others, and she was a contributor to the book, Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Opinions of the United States Supreme Court, published by the Cambridge University Press in 2016.  Prof. Cecka's articles have been cited in several Supreme Courts across the country. For the past 6 years, Prof. Cecka has also been the lead author of the treatise on Family Law for Virginia (Family Law: Theory, Practice and Forms). Prof Cecka has appeared on National Public Radio and in various podcasts and has published an Op-Ed in The Washington Post related to her advocacy in family law and child welfare.

Prof. Cecka obtained her undergraduate degree from Stanford University in 1999 and her law degree from Columbia University School of Law in 2004, where she was a Harlan Fisk Stone Scholar.