Florence Roisman - Legal and Academic Work

Legal and Academic Work

Roisman received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1959 from the University of Connecticut with high honors, a distinction in English and in History, as well as a membership in Phi Beta Kappa. She earned an LL.B. degree cum laude in 1963 from Harvard Law School.

Roisman began practice at the Federal Trade Commission in 1963. In 1964, she joined the U.S. Department of Justice in the appellate section of the Civil Division. In 1967, she became staff attorney, and later managing attorney, for the D.C. Neighborhood Legal Services Program (NLSP), initiating a 30-year association with the federally financed program of civil legal assistance to poor people. While at NLSP, she was co-counsel in several of the landlord-tenant cases that now appear in many property casebooks. Subsequent to her tenure with NLSP, she worked with the legal services program both in private practice and through the National Housing Law Project.

She has taught full-time at Georgetown University Law Center and the law schools of the University of Maryland, Baltimore, The Catholic University of America, and Widener University; she has taught part-time at The George Washington University Law School and the Antioch School of Law. In addition to Property and Land Use Planning, she has taught Civil Procedure and Administrative Law. She has written and teaches: Law and Social Change: Aspects of the Civil Rights Movement, 1948 - 1968.

In a speech to the National Legal Aid & Defender Association, Roisman told the audience of public interest lawyers that "it is your responsibility to end poverty — to attack and eliminate the structures that keep people in the United States poor." In that speech, and in an earlier article entitled "The Lawyer As Abolitionist," she insisted that there is no inevitability about poverty, and that advocates need to accept nothing less than good education, jobs, health care and housing for all. Roisman encourages lawsuits to strike down the alleged inequity of large housing tax breaks to wealthy homeowners and the comparative pittance to help the poor.

Roisman is also on the National Board of Directors of the American Civil Liberties Union (elected September 2006 to a three year term) after having been a member of the Board of Directors of the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana.