Community Justice Clinic

CJC strives to be responsive to the needs of low-income communities and supportive of grassroots organizing movements. Unlike many clinics, CJC does not focus on a particular area of law. Instead, the clinic looks to the communities it serves to identify priorities and issue areas. The clinic’s current areas of focus are workers’ rights, immigration, civil rights, consumer justice, and housing.

Recent litigation projects have included the representation of:

• Undocumented immigrant youth from Central America to obtain legal status in the United States and avoid deportation;
• Human trafficking victims and asylum seekers;
• Restaurant workers subjected to wage theft and sexual harassment by their employer;
• Victim of police misconduct in a civil rights lawsuit;
• Long-term immigration detainee in a petition for habeas corpus in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of New York.

Policy and community education projects have included working with:

• The Buffalo Tenant’s Advocacy Group on their campaign to reform the city’s rental registration.
• The New York Immigration Coalition in its campaign to limit the Buffalo Police Department’s cooperation with federal immigration enforcement;
• The Upstate Policing Project in creating and distributing know-your-rights materials for upstate immigrant communities;
• The Partnership for Public Good in advocating for an Erie County Workers’ Bill of Rights.

See Current Projects for more information about what CJC is currently working on.