John Whitlow

John Whitlow is a Professor of Law at the City University of New York School of Law, where he supervises the Community and Economic Development Clinic’s Housing Justice practice and teaches Property Law. John also serves as Co-Director of the W. Haywood Burns Program in Human and Civil Rights. Prior to joining CUNY’s faculty, John was an Assistant Professor at the University of New Mexico School of Law, where he co-founded and co-directed the school’s Economic Justice Clinic and taught Constitutional Law. John has also taught in NYU Law School’s Law, Organizing, and Social Change Clinic and at the University of Pampeu Fabra’s Public and Social Policy Center. Before entering academia, John was a Supervising Attorney at Make the Road New York, where he oversaw the organization’s housing and public benefits legal services and worked on a range of law and policy reform initiatives, and a Staff Attorney at the Urban Justice Center’s Community Development Project (now TakeRoot Justice), where he represented tenant associations, grassroots non-profits, and worker-owned cooperatives. John began his legal career as a Staff Attorney at Bedford-Stuyvesant Community Legal Services, representing low- and no-income New Yorkers facing eviction.

John’s research interests – racial capitalism, law and political economy, law and organizing, gentrification and displacement, housing justice – have been shaped by his experience as a community lawyer in New York City and Albuquerque, New Mexico, and by his upbringing in Baltimore, Maryland. John’s writing has appeared in popular and academic forums, including The New York Times, The Nation, the Albuquerque Journal, the Law and Political Economy Blog, the Fordham Urban Law Journal, the South Atlantic Quarterly, and the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Law and Social Change. John was the inaugural Visiting Faculty Fellow at Yale Law School’s Law and Political Economy Project, where his work focused on developing a legal framework to facilitate tenant collective action. He has been a Senior Fellow at NYU Law School’s Initiative for Community Power and a Faculty Fellow at the CUNY Graduate Center’s Center for Place, Culture, and Politics. John serves on the Coordinating Committee of LPE NYC and the Board of Directors of the Action Lab. He previously served on the Boards of Communities Resist, El Centro de Igualdad y Derechos, Queens Legal Services, and the Bushwick Housing Independence Project, and was a Tenant Representative on New York City’s Housing Court Advisory Council. John holds a B.A. and a certificate in comparative international economic development from Johns Hopkins University, an M.A. from the New School for Social Research, and a J.D. from the CUNY School of Law.