Professor: Abdul Rehman Khan and Hallie Jay Pope
Offered: Year-long course, both fall and spring semesters.  Students must enroll for 3 credits in the fall and 3 credits in the spring.
Credits: 6

Introduction

The Housing Justice and Legal Design Clinic employs a legal design framework to understand and respond to housing inequity in New Jersey.  As part of the Housing Justice Project funded by the State, the clinic seeks to offer high-impact support to tenants by engaging in a spectrum of work that shifts legal power to disenfranchised and marginalized communities.  Centering tenants and collaborating with organizers, students will use participatory design techniques to: (1) find and explore problems of housing injustice alongside impacted community members, (2) co-design, build, and test solutions that build tenant power, and (3) advocate for legal interventions that promote housing as a human right.

Recent projects include:

1. Designing resources and strategies to support unionization efforts led by tenants in a subsidized building experiencing various legal violations.
2. Partnering with a local community organization to assist tenants in documenting issues with conditions and alerting local code enforcement authorities if those issues remain unresolved.
3. Collaborating with a councilwoman to draft novel ordinance language that expedites emergency repairs for tenants who would otherwise face constructive eviction.
4. Conducting research on tenancy advocacy, including tenant screening practices, consumer fraud related to housing, rent control, and local efforts to establish a right to counsel in eviction proceedings.

The clinic is part of the New Jersey Legal Design Lab, a new social transformation laboratory at the Center for Social Justice’s Housing Justice Project that combines law, design, and education to channel power into local housing movements.

Course Structure

The Housing Justice and Legal Design Clinic is a 6-credit, year-long clinic that includes a 1-credit seminar and 2 credits of clinic work per semester. Students must complete 100 hours of clinic work per semester for the 2-credit clinical portion of the class.

The Seminar

The seminar focuses on substantive housing law and legal design theory, with an emphasis on movement lawyering, critical race theory, and storytelling. In addition to the seminar, students will participate in regular team meetings concerning the projects for which they are responsible. The overall goal of the seminar and clinic is to re-orient perspectives on effective lawyering alongside communities and to envision a more just society centered on adequate housing.