Clare Pastore teaches courses including Civil Procedure, Professional Responsibility, Poverty Law, Administrative Law, and the Access to Justice practicum, while continuing to practice as a leading member of the California public interest community. She has received frequent state and national recognition as an outstanding advocate, including being named one of Southern California’s "Super Lawyers" (Los Angeles Magazine, 2006-09), one of the nation’s 45 most outstanding public interest attorneys under age 45 (American Lawyer magazine, 1997) and one of California's top lawyers under 40 years old (California Law Business, 1999). She was selected as a Wasserstein Fellow by Harvard Law School in 2005 as part of its program recognizing outstanding public interest lawyers.

Professor Pastore is also of counsel to the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, where she was Senior Counsel from 2004 to 2007. She serves as co-chair of the California State Bar Access to Justice Commission’s Right to Counsel Task Force and is a member of the Amicus Briefs Committee and Professional Responsibility and Ethics Committee of the Los Angeles County Bar. She is also a past member of the American Bar Association’s Homelessness and Poverty Commission.

From 1989 to 2004, Professor Pastore was a staff attorney at the Western Center on Law and Poverty, where she litigated many state and federal cases involving poverty law and disability rights. She received one of the nation’s first Skadden Fellowships to begin her work there in 1989. Professor Pastore holds a B.A. from Colgate University and a J.D. from Yale Law School, where she was a senior editor of the Yale Law Review. She clerked for Judge Marilyn Hall Patel, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, in 1988-89.