Indiana Law Review Symposium
April 3-4, 2008

The Fair Housing Act After 40 Years:
Continuing the Mission to Eliminate Housing Discrimination and Segregation

Speaker & Author Bios:

Michael Allen is Counsel to the civil rights law firm of Relman & Dane, PLLC where his practice focuses on litigation under the Fair Housing Act and Americans with Disabilities Act. He joined the firm in June 2006, after 20 years of litigation and other advocacy on behalf of poor people and people with disabilities. From 1995 to 2006, he was senior staff attorney and director of the fair housing program at the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law and co-director of the Building Better Communities Network. From 1985-1995 he was a staff attorney and managing attorney at Legal Services of Northern Virginia, focusing on landlord-tenant and affordable housing cases. A nationally recognized expert on the disability provisions of the Fair Housing Act, Michael has litigated and lobbied at the federal and state levels, and appeared in national print and electronic media. In addition, Michael has written, lectured and consulted widely on civil rights and NIMBYism. He is a 1979 graduate of Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, and received his law degree in 1985 from the University of Virginia. He is admitted to practice in the District of Columbia and Virginia.

A nationally-recognized scholar in the area of policing and hate crime, Jeannine Bell has written extensively on hate crime and criminal justice issues. Her first book Policing Hatred: Law Enforcement, Civil Rights, and Hate Crime (New York University Press 2002) is an ethnography of a police hate crime unit. Her newest book, Police and Policing Law (Ashgate, 2006) is an edited collection which explores law and society scholarship on the police. Bell's research is broadly interdisciplinary, touching on her work in both political science and law. In that regard, she has written in the area of qualitative methodology and she is co-author of Gaining Access: A Practical and Theoretical Guide for Qualitative Researchers (AltaMira Press 2003). Her scholarship has appeared in the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, the Rutgers Race & the Law Review, Punishment and Society, and the Michigan Journal of Race and Law. An associate editor of the Law and Society Review, Bell has served a trustee of the Law and Society Association and as a member of the American Political Association's Presidential Taskforce on Political Violence and Terrorism. Her current research focuses on the impact of hate crime on housing segregation.

Sheryll D. Cashin, Professor of Law at Georgetown University, teaches Constitutional Law, Local Government Law, and Property among other subjects. She writes about race relations, government and inequality in America. Her book, The Failures of Integration: How Race and Class are Undermining the American Dream (PublicAffairs, 2004) received critical praise in The New York Times Book Review and The Chicago Tribune among other publications. Her new book, The Agitator's Daughter: A Memoir of Four Generations of One Extraordinary African-American Family (forthcoming PublicAffairs, 2008) traces the arc of American race relations through generations of her family.

Cashin has published widely in academic journals and written commentaries for several periodicals, including the L.A. Times, Washington Post, and Education Week. A frequent radio and T.V. commentator, she has appeared on NPR All Things Considered, The Diane Rehm Show, The Tavis Smiley Show, The Newshour With Jim Leher, CNN, BET, ABC News, and numerous local programs.

Professor Cashin worked in the Clinton White House as an advisor on urban and economic policy, particularly concerning community development in inner-city neighborhoods. She was law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and Judge Abner Mikva of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. She graduated summa cum laude from Vanderbilt University in 1984 with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering. As a Marshall Scholar, she went on to receive a masters in English Law, with honors, from Oxford University in 1986 and a J.D., with honors, from Harvard Law School, in 1989, where she was a member of the Harvard Law Review. Cashin was born and raised in Huntsville, Alabama, where her parents were political activists.

Stefanie DeLuca is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Center for Social Organization of Schools at Johns Hopkins University. Her research interests include urban sociology, sociology of education, transitions to adulthood and social policy. Specific projects consider educational attainment, noncognitive skills, and the effects of neighborhoods and housing experiments on families and youth. Stefanie was awarded a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation. Fellowship and her work has been published in Sociology of Education, Social Forces, Housing Policy Debate, Demography and Social Science Research. She is also contributing an article on housing and school choice programs to the Annual Review of Sociology. Stefanie regularly uses her research to inform public policy and opinion. She has given briefings on Capitol Hill and worked with local foundations, such as the Annie E. Casey foundation. In March 2006, Stefanie testified in federal court on behalf of the plaintiffs in the Thompson v. HUD housing desegregation case, using her research on neighborhood effects as the basis for her testimony. She also contributes to national press sources, such as the Baltimore Sun, Education Week and National Public Radio.

Elizabeth K. Julian is currently President and Executive Director of the Inclusive Communities Project, a non-profit organization located in Dallas, Texas, that works for the creation and maintenance of racially and economically inclusive communities through advocacy and education. ICP uses its resources to expand affordable housing opportunities in the North Texas area and provides individual support to low income minority families seeking access to higher opportunity areas through it's Mobility Assistance Program. More information about ICP is available at www.inclusivecommunities.net.

From 1994-1999 Ms. Julian served in the Clinton Administration at the Department of Housing and Urban Development as Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity , Deputy General Counsel for Civil Rights and., in the second term, as Secretary Andrew Cuomo's Representative for the Southwest Region of HUD overseeing HUD operations in the states of Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Louisiana, and Arkansas.

Prior to joining the Administration, Ms. Julian, a 1973 graduate of the University of Texas School of Law, engaged for twenty years in the practice of poverty and civil rights law in Texas, where she represented primarily low-income clients in cases involving housing discrimination, voting rights, municipal services discrimination, and indigent health care. She was co-counsel in the landmark housing desegregation cases against HUD in Dallas (Walker v. HUD) and East Texas (Young v. Pierce), and the Dallas City Council redistricting case (Williams, et al v. City of Dallas) which significantly expanded minority representation on the Dallas City Council. She was executive director of Legal Services of North Texas from 1988-1990.

In addition to her law practice, she has been involved in civic and professional activities, both locally and nationally. She served on the Texas Gender Bias Task Force which was appointed by the Texas Supreme Court to study gender bias in the justice system in Texas. She established the Texas Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights under Law of Texas and served as an Adjunct Professor at Southern Methodist School of Law in Dallas where she taught courses in Civil Rights Legislation and Women and the Law. She serves on the Board of the Poverty and Race Research Action Council, a national non-profit organization concerned with issues involving the intersection of race and poverty. As Assistant Secretary, she represented the Secretary on the U.S. Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance Board and was a member of the Interagency Task Force on Fair Lending which provided guidance on Federal fair lending enforcement programs and policies. She was a member of the Dallas 2003 Homeless Ten Year Plan Task Force, is currently a member of the Texas Housing Forum, and served on the 2005 Qualified Allocation Plan Working Group appointed by the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs to advise the Department related to the administration of the low income housing tax credit program.

Ms. Julian received the 2001 Mexican American Bar Association's President's Award, the 2004 Martin Luther King, Jr. Justice Award by the Dallas Bar Association , and the 2005 Outstanding Service Award by the William Wayne Justice Center for Public Interest Law, University of Texas School of Law.

Ms. Julian is married to Ed Cloutman, an attorney specializing in labor/employment law in Dallas. They have one son, Edward, who is a first year student at Baylor Law School.

James A. Kushner teaches land use law at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles and is Adjunct Professor of Urban Planning at University of Southern California School of Policy, Planning and Development. He is the co-author of Housing and Community Development - Cases and Materials (3d ed), Fair Housing: Discrimination in Real Estate, Community Development and Revitalization (2d ed.); Government Discrimination: Equal Protection Law and Litigation, Apartheid in America, Healthy Cities, The Post-Automobile City, Land Use Regulation, Comparative Urban Planning Law, and Subdivision Law and Growth Management. He graduated from the University of Miami and received his Juris Doctorate from the University of Maryland. He specializes in European and American planning and land development. He has taught at Utrecht University in The Netherlands, University of Greenwich at Saxion Hoogschool in Deventer, The Netherlands, Dortmund University in Germany, the University of British Columbia in Canada, the University of Missouri, the University of Virginia, the University of California in both Berkeley and Los Angeles, and at the University of Southern California.

Professor john a. powell is an internationally recognized authority in the areas of civil rights and civil liberties and a wide range of issues including race, structural racism, ethnicity, housing, poverty and democracy. He is Executive Director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at The Ohio State University and he holds the Gregory H. Williams Chair in Civil Rights & Civil Liberties at the University's Michael E. Moritz College of Law.

Professor powell has written extensively on a number of issues including structural racism, racial justice and regionalism, concentrated poverty and urban sprawl, opportunity based housing, voting rights, affirmative action in the United States, South Africa and Brazil, racial and ethnic identity, spirituality and social justice, and the needs of citizens in a democratic society.

Previously, he founded and directed the Institute on Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota. He also served as Director of Legal Services in Miami, Florida and was National Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union, where he was instrumental in developing educational adequacy theory.

Professor powell has worked and lived in Africa, where he was a consultant to the governments of Mozambique and South Africa. He has also lived and worked in India and done work in South America and Europe. He is one of the co-founders of the Poverty & Race Research Action Council and serves on the board of several national organizations. Professor powell has taught at numerous law schools including Harvard and Columbia University. He joined the faculty at The Ohio State University in 2002.

Under his leadership, The Kirwan Institute has taken a national leadership role in researching, developing, and advocating for regional solutions to problems associated with racialized space. To advance this work, Professor powell has developed an "opportunity-based" housing model that provides a critical and creative framework for thinking about affordable housing, racialized space, and how an individual's destiny is impacted by where they live. The central principal of this model is that residents of metropolitan regions are situated within a complex and interconnected web of opportunity structures that significantly shapes their quality of life. These opportunity structures include education, health care, employment, transportation, and civic engagement.

John P. Relman is the founder and director of Relman & Dane. Since 1986, Mr. Relman has represented scores of plaintiffs and public interest organizations in individual and class action discrimination cases in federal court. From 1989 to 1999, Mr. Relman served as project director of the Fair Housing Project at the Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs. Under his leadership the project achieved national recognition, winning some of the largest housing, lending, and public accommodations discrimination jury verdicts and settlements obtained in the country.

From 1986 to 1989, Mr. Relman worked as a staff attorney at the National Office of the Lawyers' Committee. Prior to joining the Committee, he clerked for the Honorable Sam J. Ervin III of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and the Honorable Joyce Hens Green of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Mr. Relman's better-known cases include Timus v. William J. Davis, Inc. ($2.4 million jury verdict for housing discrimination against families with children); Dyson v. Denny's Restaurants ($17.725 million class settlement for racial discrimination against customers); Pugh v. Avis Rent-A-Car ($5.4 class settlement for racial discrimination in the rental of cars); and Gilliam v. Adam's Mark Hotels ($2.1 million class settlement for racial discrimination against guests). Mr. Relman has written and lectured extensively in the areas of fair housing and fair lending law and practice and has provided numerous training classes and seminars for plaintiffs' lawyers, fair housing organizations, the real estate industry, and lending institutions. He is the author of Housing Discrimination Practice Manual, published by the West Group.

Mr. Relman teaches public interest law at Georgetown University Law Center, where he serves as an adjunct professor. He received his law degree from the University of Michigan and undergraduate degree from Harvard.

Florence Wagman Roisman began practice at the Federal Trade Commission in 1963. In 1964, she joined the U.S. Department of Justice in the appellate section of the Civil Division. In 1967, she became staff attorney, and later managing attorney, for the D.C. Neighborhood Legal Services Program (NLSP), initiating a 30-year association with the federally financed program of civil legal assistance to poor people. While at NLSP, she was co-counsel in several of the landlord-tenant cases that now appear in many property casebooks. Subsequent to her tenure with NLSP, she worked with the legal services program both in private practice and through the National Housing Law Project.

In 2000, she received the Thurgood Marshall Award given by the District of Columbia Bar. In 1989, she was the first recipient of the Kutak-Dodds Prize, awarded by the ABA's Standing Committee on Legal Aid and Indigent Defendants and the National Legal Aid and Defender Association. Prof. Roisman received the inaugural Equal Justice Works Outstanding Law School Faculty Award in 2004 "for her dogged pursuit of equal justice and her pivotal role in nurturing a public interest ethic among law students."

She has taught full-time at Georgetown University Law Center and the law schools of the University of Maryland, Catholic University, and Widener University; she has taught part-time at the George Washington University National Law Center and the Antioch School of Law. In 2006 she was the J. Skelly Wright Fellow at Yale Law School. In 2002, she received a Trustee's Teaching Award from Indiana University. Professor Roisman serves on the boards of the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Indiana, the Society of American Law Teachers, and the Poverty and Race Research Action Council, of which she was a co-founder.

The substantive focus of her practice, teaching, and writing has been on low-income housing, homelessness, and housing discrimination and segregation.

James E. Rosenbaum (B.A.Yale, Ph.D.Harvard) is Professor of Sociology, Education, and Social Policy at Northwestern University. His books include Crossing the Class and Color Lines,Univ. of Chicago Press, 2000, and Beyond College for All. Russell Sage Foundation. 2001, which was awarded the Waller Prize in Sociology. His book, After Admission: From College Access to College Success will be published in November, 2006. He has also studied the Gautreaux housing mobility program and examined the changes in low-income black youth whose families were assigned to middle-class suburbs or to inner-city areas. His research has been published in sociology and policy journals, and has been reported in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Fortune Magazine, Chronicle of Higher Education, and Sixty Minutes.

Len Rubinowitz, Professor of Law at Northwestern University School of Law, has served on the faculty there for more than 30 years. He teaches courses on housing and urban development, Law and Social Change, Criminal Law, and Public Interest Law. He writes about housing discrimination and the courts, social movements, and social change.

In 1974, he published the book Low-Income Housing: Suburban Strategies. His 2000 co-authored book, Crossing the Class and Color Line: From Public Housing to White Suburbia (with James Rosenbaum), examines the history and impact of Chicago’s landmark Gautreaux public housing desegregation case.

He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Wisconsin and holds an L.L.B. from Yale Law School, where he served on the Yale Law Journal. He served in various positions with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and joined Northwestern University’s Center for Urban Affairs (now Institute for Policy Research) in 1972. Several years later, he joined the faculty of the Law School, where he has received numerous teaching awards, including the Robert Childres Memorial Award for Teaching Excellence (three times), the Outstanding Professor of a Small Class (seven times), Outstanding First-Year Course Professor, and the Dean’s Teaching Award. In 2001, the law school’s Student Funded Public Interest Fellowship organization renamed its “SFPIF grants” the “Len Rubinowitz Public Interest Fellowship”.

Robert G. Schwemm is the Ashland Professor at the University of Kentucky College of Law, where he has taught since 1975. He began his legal career with Sidley & Austin in Washington, D.C. and then was Chief Trial Counsel for the Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Communities in Chicago. Professor Schwemm has written and lectured extensively on fair housing law. His works include a dozen articles in leading law reviews throughout the country and the treatise Housing Discrimination: Law and Litigation. Professor Schwemm has been plaintiffs' counsel in several landmark housing discrimination cases, including three in the U.S. Supreme Court: Meyer v. Holley (2003); Gladstone Realtors v. Village of Bellwood (1979); and Village of Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corp. (1977). From 1986 to 1990, Professor Schwemm was Vice-Chair of the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights, and in 1991, he served as a special attorney and scholar-in-residence with the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. From 1998 to 2000, he was a member of the Consumer Advisory Council of the Federal Reserve Board.

Theodore M. Shaw is Director-Counsel and President of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF), the nation's premier civil rights law firm. On May 1, 2004, Shaw became the fifth person to lead the organization in its 64-year history.

Shaw joined LDF in 1982. He directed LDF's education docket and litigated school desegregation, capital punishment, and other civil rights cases throughout the country. In 1987, he established LDF's Western Regional Office in Los Angeles, and served as its Western Regional Counsel. In 1990, he left LDF to join the faculty of the University of Michigan Law School, where he taught constitutional law, civil procedure, and civil rights. In 1993, on a leave of absence from Michigan, he rejoined LDF as Associate Director-Counsel.

Shaw was lead counsel in a coalition that represented African-American and Latino student-intervenors in the University of Michigan undergraduate affirmative action admissions case. In 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court heard that case, along with one challenging the use of affirmative action at the University of Michigan Law School. The Court ruled in favor of diversity as a compelling state interest.

Shaw graduated from Wesleyan University with honors and from the Columbia University School of Law, where he was a Charles Evans Hughes Fellow. Upon graduation, Shaw worked as a trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice from 1979 until 1982 in Washington, D.C. He litigated civil rights cases throughout the country at the trial and appellate levels, and in the U.S. Supreme Court. Shaw resigned from the Justice Department in protest of the Reagan Administration's civil rights policies.

Shaw has testified before Congress and before state legislatures on numerous occasions. He has been a frequent guest on television and radio programs, and has published numerous newspaper, magazine and law review articles. He also has traveled and lectured extensively on civil rights and human rights in Europe, South Africa, South America, and Japan. He currently serves on the Legal Advisory Network of the European Roma Rights Council, based in Budapest, Hungary.

The National Bar Association Young Lawyers Division recently presented Shaw with the A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr. Memorial Award. He also received the Lawrence A. Wein Prize for Social Justice from Columbia University. Further, he was awarded the Baldwin Medal, the highest honor given by the Wesleyan University alumni body, for extraordinary service to the University and the public interest. He served on the Wesleyan Board of Trustees for 15 years, and was Senior Vice Chair of the Board when he retired from the board in June 2003.

Shaw is a member of the bar in New York and in California, and is admitted to practice before the U.S. District Courts for the Central and Northern Districts of California, the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, Ninth, Tenth and Eleventh Circuits, and the United States Supreme Court. He is an adjunct professor of law at Columbia Law School, and the second appointee to the Phyllis Beck Chair at Temple Law School, which he held during the 2003 spring semester. He was the second recipient of the Haywood Burns Chair in Civil Rights at CUNY School of Law, which he held for the 1997-1998 academic year.

Margery Austin Turner directs the Urban Institute's Metropolitan Housing and Communities policy center. A nationally recognized expert on urban policy and neighborhood issues, Ms. Turner analyzes issues of residential location, racial and ethnic discrimination and its contribution to neighborhood segregation and inequality, and the role of housing policies in promoting residential mobility and location choice. Much of her current work focuses on the Washington metropolitan area, investigating conditions and trends in neighborhoods across the region.

Ms. Turner served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Research at the Department of Housing and Urban Development from 1993 through 1996, focusing HUD's research agenda on the problems of racial discrimination, concentrated poverty, and economic opportunity in America's metropolitan areas. During her tenure, HUD's research office launched three major social science demonstration projects to test different strategies for helping families from distressed inner-city neighborhoods gain access to opportunities through employment and education.

Prior to joining the Clinton Administration at HUD, Ms. Turner directed the housing research program at the Urban Institute. She has co-authored two national housing discrimination studies, which use paired testing to determine the incidence of discrimination against minority homeseekers. She has also extended the paired testing methodology to measure discrimination in employment and to mortgage lending. Ms. Turner has directed research on racial and ethnic steering, neighborhood outcomes for families who receive federal housing assistance, and emerging patterns of neighborhood diversity in city and suburban neighborhoods.

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