Housing Discrimination and Voting Rights Cases

Early in my career, I worked on a number of notable housing discrimination and voting rights cases.

ACORN stands for Association for Community Organizations for Reform Now. It was started back in the 1970s to create a membership association to help low-income citizens with issues that affected them. So rather than being single-issue, ACORN would work on various campaigns that its membership deemed important to its socio-economic group.

I think the first lawsuit I worked on was the one against Michigan. ACORN v. Miller. We sued Illinois. There we entered into a consent decree, which Illinois then tried to get out of with ACORN v. Edgar. We sued Louisiana, twice. ACORN v. Fowler.  We sued a number of other states—New York, Pennsylvania, California. The first round of suits was to require states to enforce it at all. Then we sued if we believed that they were not being diligent about offering voter registration in all social services as required. So for example, some might offer voter registration at DMV offices, but not at other social service offices.

Another case was advocating for Kevin Friloux who wanted to run for local office, but believed he was being retaliated against for doing so. That was an interesting case based on facts and subtle legal issues and which went to trial. See article regarding Friloux v. St. Charles School Board.

In private practice since then, I’ve branched out to other cases of a wide range from workers rights to financial to personal injury (although many of those settle and do not ever become public knowledge).