Housing and Environmental Litigation
Represent Tenants in a Wide Variety of Defensive and Affirmative Litigation
In the Housing and Environmental Justice Clinic, students have the opportunity to represent tenants in a wide variety of defensive and affirmative litigation against landlords, state and local government agencies. The clinic’s docket ranges from smaller matters on behalf of one or a few clients to large, systemic litigation on behalf of many people.
During the course of a representation, students in the clinic may be called on to conduct investigations; research caselaw, statutes and regulations; draft or respond to an initial pleading such as complaints; participate in discovery including propounding and responding to interrogatories, requests for documents and take depositions; draft and argue motions for and in court and negotiate with opposing counsel all in preparation for the potentiality of trial.
The clinic’s cases touch on a range of legal issues from housing and consumer debt law to state and federal civil rights discrimination law. Representation may be before administrative bodies, in state court or in federal district court for the Eastern or Southern Districts.
The supervising attorney in this clinic, Professor Norrinda Brown, has a breadth of complex civil litigation experience in federal court ranging from representation of hundreds of federally subsidized tenants in a lawsuit against a law enforcement agency and two cities to representing Fortune 500 companies in white collar litigation to state court insurance law matters.
Professor Brown is an award-winning housing advocate and joined the full-time faculty in the fall. Brown comes to Fordham from Rutgers where she taught courses in Property Law and Critical Race Theory. and Landlord Tenant Law. There, she also served as director of the Civil Justice Clinic, and as advisor to the African and Black Law Students Association and the Newark Housing Rights Coalition.