Stephen Loffredo

Stephen Loffredo is Professor of Law Emeritus at CUNY School of Law, where he specialized in constitutional law, administrative law, social welfare law and economic rights and taught for many years in the law school’s clinical program. He co-founded and co-directed the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic, the Health Law Concentration, the Workers’ Rights Clinic, and the Labor Docket of the Community Economic Development Clinic, and he founded and co-directed the Economic Justice Project, which received the Clinical Legal Education Association’s Award for Excellence in recognition of its work on educational access and economic mobility.  He twice received the outstanding professor award and was recognized by the Bar Association of the City of New York for “extraordinary dedication and outstanding performance” in advancing the legal rights of poor people in New York City.

Professor Loffredo is co-author, with Helen Hershkoff, of Getting By: Economic Rights and Legal Protections for People with Low Income (Oxford) and The Rights of the Poor (S. Ill.). His article Poverty, Democracy and Constitutional Law (University of Pennsylvania Law Review) has been widely cited in constitutional law and human rights texts and treatises, and internationally in litigation seeking subsistence rights and other legal protections for politically and economically marginalized people.

In the 1980s, Professor Loffredo worked as a staff attorney at The Legal Aid Society in the South Bronx, where he provided neighborhood legal services and litigated impact cases with his colleagues, including the first generation of cases establishing a right to shelter for homeless families, and the first federal appeals court case to award compensatory damages to welfare recipients for violations of their due process rights. As pro bono counsel to the Urban Justice Center, he litigated cases that established the right of homeless shelter residents to cash assistance and Medicaid, and that mandated systemic reforms to New York City’s application processes for welfare, food stamps and Medicaid, opening those programs to many thousands of destitute individuals and families who had been wrongfully excluded.

Professor Loffredo currently serves on the New York City Conflicts of Interest Board, following appointment by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and serves on the board of directors of the Urban Justice Center and the Eastern District Civil Litigation Fund.  He earned his J.D. from Harvard Law School, where he spent his third year in the inaugural class of the Legal Services Institute, learning and practicing community-based poverty law with the Institute’s founders, Gary Bellow, Jeanne Charn, and Clinton Bamberger. After graduation, he served as judicial clerk to the Honorable Daniel J. O’Hern of the New Jersey Supreme Court.