Heather R. Abraham

Degrees

• LL.M. (Master of Law), Georgetown University Law Center
• J.D., University of Minnesota School of Law
• M.P.P., University of Minnesota Humphrey School of Public Affairs
• B.A., Kalamazoo College

Heather Abraham is a tenure-track Associate Professor of Law the University at Buffalo School of Law. A national expert on fair housing law, her research and teaching focus on civil rights, fair housing, landlord-tenant, real property, and clinical legal education. She directs the Civil Rights & Housing Clinic, a litigation clinic that combines direct representation for tenants facing eviction and civil rights impact litigation, spanning fair housing, employment discrimination, and voting rights.

Her research explores frontiers in fair housing law for the benefit of impact litigators, legislators, and other advocates who seek to use legal remedies to reduce housing segregation and discrimination. Through her scholarship, she seeks to reshape fair housing law and offer new tools for litigators to make impact through strategic litigation. In that regard, her scholarship is intended to both contribute to the academic literature and enhance access to justice. For instance, her article Segregation Autopilot: How the Government Perpetuates Segregation and How to Stop It, explores how federal policies worsen and amplify existing segregation and makes specific recommendations for how to mitigate the government’s segregative footprint. Her work has been published in a variety of law reviews and peer-reviewed journals, including the Iowa Law Review, Yale Law & Policy Review, SMU Law Review, University of Illinois Chicago Law Review, ABA Journal of Affordable Housing and Community Development Law, and Middle States Geographer, among others.

Professor Abraham believes in the transformative power of experiential learning, especially in the practice of law. Her approach to teaching is to ask hard questions about how the legal system instills and reinforces injustice. Within that framework, she pushes her students to think deeply about the societal impact of the law and their role as attorneys in shaping it. She challenges students to question whether impact litigation is an effective tool for social change, and how it might be combined with other tools to effect broader societal reform. In the classroom and through case work, she presses students to be anti-racist, trauma-informed attorneys who can expand access to justice. In the Civil Rights & Housing Clinic, she promotes four primary andragogical objectives: building confidence, forming individualized lawyering identities, inspiring a growth mindset that incorporates routine reflection, and developing practical lawyering skills such as interviewing clients and drafting effective pleadings.

She previously taught at Georgetown Law, where she was a Supervising Attorney in the Civil Rights Clinic, an immersive, full-time litigation clinic. She also participated in Georgetown Law’s top-ranked clinical teaching fellowship program, which is uniquely designed to steep clinicians in the foundations of clinical pedagogy.

In 2016, Professor Abraham crowdfunded an innovative public interest fellowship through Equal Justice Works to combat rural homelessness and housing discrimination. In that role, she defended low-income clients against unlawful evictions. She also built a coalition of public and private partners to launch a restorative, problem-solving “Community Outreach Court,” to mitigate the collateral consequences of conviction and break the debtor’s prison cycle that traps many low-income individuals. In 2018, the Michigan Courts honored Professor Abraham with the Robert P. Griffin award for her contributions to the judicial system.

She began her legal career as a judicial clerk in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan for U.S. District Judges Gordon J. Quist and Robert J. Jonker, then clerked for the Hon. Richard A. Griffin of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. In the federal courts, she gained a wide breadth of exposure to litigation, working on over four hundred civil and criminal cases at all stages of litigation, in addition to appeals from administrative agencies on a host of matters from whistleblower complaints to immigration appeals.

She has spent her life engaged in public affairs, working on political campaigns at nearly all levels of government. Early in her career, she worked in the U.S. Senate as a legislative staff member and served in the U.S. Peace Corps in Guatemala, where she helped rebuild the post-civil war municipal government in a rural northwest community in Huehuetenango.