As Professor and Founding Director of the Community and Economic Development Clinic (CEDC) Carmen Huertas-Noble assumes her new role as Clinic Dean, the CEDC is bestowed new leadership as Missy Risser-Lovings ’13 and John Whitlow ’03 embrace the shared role of Co-Directors. Revisit their histories as they share their mission and visions for the coming year.
Missy Risser-Lovings ’13
Clinical Instructor | Supervising Attorney | Co-Director, CEDC Clinic
She/her
Missy Risser-Lovings ’13 is a Clinical Law Instructor, Supervising Attorney, and Co-Director of CUNY School of Law’s Community and Economic Development Clinic (CEDC), which provides legal and policy support to community-led organizations that redress structural inequities faced by marginalized communities.
At the CEDC, Missy teaches and supervises students in the CEDC’s Economic Democracy Practice Area, which provides transactional legal assistance to groups organizing to build community power and democratize the economy, such as cooperatives, community land trusts, nonprofits, and unincorporated associations. This work includes entity-type counseling and formation, governance, tax exemption, and various organizational operational issues, such as contracts and employment law.
Previously, she was a Supervising Attorney and Staff Attorney in the Capacity-Building and Equitable Neighborhoods practices at the Community Development Project of the Urban Justice Center, where she provided similar transactional legal assistance and worked in partnership with community groups organizing for community control and against displacement. She helped found the Worker Cooperative Business Development Initiative, a coalition of groups building cooperative infrastructure, which has received the largest city investment in worker cooperatives of any city nationwide to date.
Missy is a cofounder of 1 Worker 1 Vote, a nonprofit that supports the development of worker cooperatives, particularly unionized worker cooperatives. Missy’s research interests focus on cooperatives and community land trusts as tools to address the various crises low-income communities face under racial capitalism, and the intersection of CEDC and racial and criminal justice work through abolition democracy. Missy obtained her J.D. from CUNY School of Law; her M.Ed. in Urban Education from Temple University; and her B.A. from Vassar College.
John Whitlow ’03
Associate Professor of Law | Co-Director, CEDC Clinic
He/his
John Whitlow ‘03 is an Associate Professor at the CUNY School of Law, where he teaches primarily in the Community and Economic Development Clinic (CEDC), supervising the CEDC’s Anti-Displacement Practice Area.
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. Before joining the faculty at UNM, John was a Clinical Professor at CUNY.
Prior to 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 housing and criminal justice policy initiatives, and a Staff Attorney at the Urban Justice Center’s Community Development Project, where he represented tenant associations and provided transactional legal assistance to grassroots non-profits and worker-owned cooperatives.
John began his legal career as a Staff Attorney in the Eviction Prevention Unit of Bedford-Stuyvesant Community Legal Services, representing low-income families facing eviction.
John holds a B.A. and a certificate in comparative international economic development from the Johns Hopkins University, an M.A. from the New School for Social Research, and a J.D. from the CUNY School of Law.
He has been a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics, a Visiting Lecturer at Pompeu Fabra University’s Public and Social Policy Center, and a Guest Lecturer in NYU Law School’s Law, Organizing and Social Change Clinic. John’s research interests – racial capitalism, law and political economy, law and organizing, gentrification/displacement – were shaped by his upbringing in Baltimore, Maryland. John’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, the Albuquerque Journal, the Fordham Urban Law Journal, the CUNY Law Review, the Law and Political Economy Blog, and Counterpunch.
How long have you both been involved with CEDC, how did you both first get involved, and what would you each mark as your favorite moment serving this clinic?
Missy
My first involvement with the CEDC Clinic was as a student-attorney in 2012. I then went on to do advanced clinic work with the CEDC Clinic, was a TA for the CEDC Seminar, and stayed on as a legal fellow upon graduation (starting CEDC’s fellowship program, which has added capacity to the clinic since). When I left to practice outside of CUNY, I maintained contact with the CEDC by guest teaching classes and co-counseling some cases. I also then co-taught in the CEDC Clinic and CEDC Seminar before coming back to the CEDC to teach full-time in 2018.
A recent favorite moment serving the clinic was receiving a referral from our Defenders clinic. The Defenders Clinic had (impressively) helped a client receive clemency, and he wanted to form a nonprofit to continue doing some of the organizing and advocacy work he had been doing while on the inside. Not only did this allow for a nice collaboration across clinics, but it helped reinforce that CEDC work and criminal justice work are interrelated, and that our work should not be siloed.
Working with the new nonprofit to help continue the violence interruption work this individual had been doing, and to help them build out some other community sustaining work other leaders of the nonprofit had been doing for years, was a great example of the importance of working with directly impacted people to help lead organizing efforts to address the various structural problems their communities face, and the role we can play to help facilitate that process.
John
I began working in the CEDC in 2011 and returned to the Clinic in 2018 after several years teaching at the University of New Mexico. It’s really hard to pick a singular favorite moment because there’s so much to choose from – I genuinely love it every time a team of students comes together to help a client build (or build out) their organization, especially since in this field, our clients’ work is so vital and often so under-resourced. Also – on a different note – it’s always wonderful to hear from graduates about all the fantastic work they’re doing out in the world.
How has the clinic’s form and function changed/been shaped by the pandemic?
Missy
The clinic’s form has not changed substantially since the Covid-19 pandemic hit, aside from the obvious of transitioning to doing our work remotely. The actual work we do has changed in a few ways. First, clients, including cooperatives, have pivoted to doing more pandemic-related crisis intervention work. For example, many members have lost income during the pandemic, and so there have been various organizing efforts to help sustain those members both on a small scale and on a larger policy scale, especially for immigrant and other excluded workers. Other groups have started doing food insecurity-related work, and/or work around Covid testing and the vaccine.
We have also been approached by more clients seeking conflict resolution support, likely due at least in part to conditions exacerbated by the pandemic. Finally, our work has also expanded to address more mutual aid and emergency fund issues. The pandemic has brought to light the gross inequities our clinic is designed to address. So, we and our partners have also used the general public’s recent awareness/interest to try to amplify the solutions our partners have promoted for years, now that more people are listening.
John
The crisis of the pandemic has impacted the CEDC in a couple of prominent ways. First, our legal services are driven by our clients’ needs, and since most of our clients are grassroots organizations that are fighting against the effects of all manner of inequalities, our work has had to change as those inequalities have intensified and morphed. For example, on the Anti-Displacement side, this has meant coming up with creative ways to support tenants who can’t afford to pay rent because of the pandemic, and it has meant updating our thinking around mutual aid, as well as enhancing tenant legal protections.
Second, the crisis compelled us to take a hard look at our syllabus, and to adapt it to the urgency of the present. We’ve always emphasized the context of our client work and grounded it in a critique of racial capitalism, and – thanks to Missy – last year we worked to infuse our syllabus with an abolition focus and to think seriously and concretely about the nuances and challenges of teaching/learning online.
How did it feel finding out you’d be co-directing the clinic?
Missy
It was exciting! While it will be tough shoes to fill, given that Carmen was the Founding Director and is such a force of nature, I look forward to taking on the mantle with John and thinking about our work on the meta level, as it’s easy to get hyper-focused on the student and client work, and not our programmatic work as a whole. Our team has also expanded between being an anchor clinic of the part-time program, and having legal fellows, staff attorneys, and our senior public policy fellow, so I look forward to strategizing around how best to function as a team to create a supportive community of practice and enhance our efforts.
John
I’m excited to continue working with Missy, as well as the other members of our team, Chris and Rafael. And – as always – I’m really looking forward to digging into our work with a new group of students. The start of the semester is always a little anxiety-producing, but it’s also energizing and rejuvenating.
How can students get involved in the work of the CED? How can they prepare for this work even before they enter the clinic?
Missy
Generally the best way for students to get involved in the work of the CED is to enroll in our Lawyering III CEDC Seminar and CEDC clinic. I would be happy to meet with any student that is interested in our work and/or has questions.
John
The obvious answer is take the CEDC lawyering seminar, which is intended to prepare students for the Clinic. Beyond that, though, there’s not exactly a linear path to this work, and we welcome all students who are committed to social justice lawyering, who take a creative approach to engaging with the law, and who are interested in helping to build the power of poor and working people.
Shout-Outs and Gratitude
Missy
Dean Huertas-Noble has been such a tremendous inspiration and source of support my entire legal career. I can’t begin to describe how much I value her and am honored that she entrusted the CEDC to me and John. I’m excited to build on the extraordinary foundation she created with John, and for us to do her proud.
John
I want to thank Carmen, who founded this clinic over a decade ago and built it from the ground up on principles of lawyering for social, racial, and economic justice, and on self-determination for our clients. It’s an honor to be continuing that legacy, and I couldn’t be happier to be engaged in that project with Missy, who is as gifted a lawyer and educator as I’ve known.