The Center for Social Justice is the Law School’s newest Center, but it has a long legacy. Case Western Reserve School of Law has a remarkable history of commitment to social justice - some of the nation’s most courageous and influential civil right attorneys have been graduates of the school. The Center for Social Justice honors our illustrious alumni by seeking to carry on their work through a variety of academic and community-oriented programs. But the Center does not just look back – our aim is to shape the future by promoting public service and encouraging students to do public interest work after they graduate.

Community Outreach

Some activities of the center, such as expanding pro bono opportunities in the Cleveland area for law students and pipeline projects with the Cleveland public schools, provide law students with opportunities to use their time and talents to help meet the unmet legal needs of underserved populations, build their legal skills, and work with practicing lawyers in the community. These activities are building bridges between the law school and the Cleveland community. Current Center projects include:

• Research collaboration on aspects of the foreclosure crisis, particularly in Cuyahoga County, with CWRU’s Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences Center on Urban Poverty and Community Economic Development.
• Participation in the Housing and Community Development Roundtable, a collaboration among Cleveland area academic centers and practitioners interested in housing issues.
• Organizing and facilitating pro bono opportunities for law students to work with the Cleveland Legal Aid Society, the Cuyahoga County Witness/Victim Center, the Ohio Benefits Bank, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, among others.
• Involvement with the Law & Leadership Program, a program started by the Ohio Supreme Court to help promising youth from disadvantaged neighborhoods to compete at high academic levels and prepare them to be future leaders in the legal profession.
• Helping with the Stephanie Tubbs-Jones Summer Legal Academy, which gives minority high school students an intensive two-week summer program designed to excite them about the possibility of pursuing a legal career.
• Forming a student arm of the Center – Law Students for Social Justice – to help mobilize students to engage in pro bono and community service activities.
• Convening a student advisory panel to the Center to help facilitate and coordinate social justice and community service activities initiated by various independent student groups.

Scholarships, Fellowships, and Loan Repayment Assistance

A key objective of the Center for Social Justice is to reduce substantially the economic disincentives to students’ choosing public interest employment after graduation. Most law students graduate with a sizable debt incurred in the process of getting their college and law school education. It is also a reality of life today that almost any public interest job that a recent graduate might be able to get will pay substantially less than a job that he or she might be able to get with a law firm or corporation. Not surprisingly, students eager to do public interest work after graduation commonly resolve to spend at least several years doing other, more lucrative work to pay off their student loans. And more often than not, the “several years” turn into a lifetime as personal and professional factors combine to make a major change in career path much more difficult than anticipated at the start. The Center for Social Justice seeks to expand the Law School’s existing Loan Repayment Assistance Program significantly in terms of both the range of opportunities supported and the magnitude of the support.

Another means that the center is using to give graduates more freedom to pursue public interest work is to provide scholarships for students who have demonstrated a commitment to doing public interest work after graduation. The smaller the accumulated debt at the time of graduation, the less the pressure to shelve for the time being one’s desire to do public interest work.

Summer fellowships are yet another crucial piece of the puzzle. The Center provides a number of summer fellowships to rising 2L and 3L students who choose to take unpaid public interest internships. In the summer of 2009, the Center was able to support 27 Summer Fellows, who worked in a variety of settings:

Cook County Public Defender's Office
Akron Community Legal Aid Society
Office of the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Ohio
Cuyahoga County Public Defender Office
U.S. Senate Committee on Aging
Lakeshore Legal Aid
International Justice Mission, Kenya
ARC of Greater Cleveland
AIDS and Rights Alliance for Southern Africa
Cook County Office of the Public Guardian
Legal Aid Society of Cleveland
U.S. Department of Justice Miami Immigration Court
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Seattle Regional Office
U.S.. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
Illinois State Appellate Defender
ACLU of Ohio
Office of the Federal Public Defender, Northern District of Ohio
U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division
Office of the California Attorney General
New Jersey Attorney General's Office, Criminal Division - Gangs and Organized Crime
Advocates for Basic Legal Equality, Special Litigation and Support Unit
Empire Justice Center, Law Students in Action Project, Albany, New York
San Diego County Public Defender's Office
Equal Justice Foundation
Legal Aid Society of Columbus

Associated Faculty

Professor Jessie Hill, Director
Professor Jonathan Entin
Professor Michael Benza
Professor Robert Strassfeld
Professor Matthew Rossman
Professor Judith Lipton
Professor Laura McNally
Professor Louise McKinney
Professor Kenneth Margolis
Professor Kenneth Ledford
Professor Emeritus Melvyn Durchslag