NEW YORK — The City University of New York School of Law’s founding director of its Community and Economic Development (CED) Clinic is set to be honored at the upcoming 2020 Cooperative Hall of Fame ceremony in Washington, DC.
Professor Carmen Huertas-Noble is receiving the cooperative community’s highest honor reserved for outstanding leaders whose contributions to the cooperative movement are genuinely heroic.“Her reach has been far and wide, due to her leadership, innovation, and long-term dedication and commitment to the worker cooperative system an
d its ability to address income inequality and economic justice,” shares Professor Missy Risser, of CUNY Law’s CED Clinic faculty.
“Our work, and the entire CUNY Law community, is grounded in the belief that social justice lawyering is most effective when it is strategically deployed to build the power of low-income and marginalized communities,” says Professor Huertas-Noble. “I founded the CED clinic to serve community-based clients fighting to alleviate poverty, to alter power relationships, and to promote community development in a way that empowers workers and residents as planners, decision-makers, and agents of change. CUNY Law is uniquely positioned to carry out this work given our public interest mission, social justice values, and students transforming the nature of lawyering.”
“Carmen is a role model; she teaches and practices a cooperative lawyering approach – she empowers individuals and facilitates collaboration across New York City and the globe,” praises Dean Mary Lu Bilek. “She helps the Law School live a vital element of our mission.”
Known for providing strategic advocacy and legal support to neighborhood institutions, as well as organizing for social and economic justice, Professor Huertas-Noble has advanced the work and causes of organizations at the forefront of creating and supporting worker-owned cooperatives, including ROC-NY, 1 Worker 1 Vote, Inc., Green Worker Cooperatives, and the New York City Network of Worker Cooperatives. Most recently, the CED Clinic has started to develop the legal framework for a new hybrid union coop model created by Mondragon International USA, the United Steelworkers and the Ohio Employee Ownership Center.
Professor Huertas-Noble’s research and scholarship focus on promoting alternative ownership models, including community land trusts and worker-owned cooperatives (alternative institutions). Her scholarship emphasizes the role of lawyers in creating meaningful, client participatory decision-making processes as part of the lawyer’s counseling process and in support of client-centered lawyering on behalf of alternative institutions.