Stephen Loffredo teaches in the areas of constitutional law, administrative law, social welfare law, and economic rights, and has taught for many years in the law school’s clinical program. He founded and co-directed the Economic Justice Project, which received the Clinical Legal Education Association’s Award for Excellence, co-founded and co-directed the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic, the Health Law Concentration, and the Workers’ Rights Clinic, and directed the Labor Docket of the Community Economic Development Clinic. He twice received the Outstanding Professor Award and was honored 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 one of the earliest federal appeals court cases to award compensatory damages to welfare recipients for violation of due process rights. As pro bono counsel to the Urban Justice Center, he litigated actions 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. He serves on the board of directors of the Urban Justice Center and the Eastern District Civil Litigation Fund.
Professor Loffredo 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. Following graduation, he served as judicial clerk to the Honorable Daniel J. O’Hern of the New Jersey Supreme Court.
