John Whitlow is an Associate Professor at the CUNY School of Law, where he co-directs the Community and Economic Development Clinic (CEDC), supervising the CEDC’s Housing Justice and Tenant Power Practice Area. John also teaches Property Law and courses on housing justice and tenants’ 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, and a Visiting Clinical Instructor in NYU Law School’s Law, Organizing, and Social Change Clinic. John has also taught 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 in the Eviction Prevention Unit of Bedford-Stuyvesant Community Legal Services.
John’s research interests – racial capitalism, law and political economy, law and organizing, gentrification/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 Albuquerque Journal, Counterpunch, the Law and Political Economy Blog, the Fordham Urban Law Journal, the South Atlantic Quarterly, and the CUNY Law Review. John is currently a Senior Fellow at NYU Law School’s Initiative for Community Power. He was the Inaugural Visiting Faculty Fellow at Yale Law School’s Law and Political Economy Project and a Faculty Fellow at the CUNY Graduate Center’s Center for Place, Culture, and Politics. John serves on the board of directors of the Action Lab, an organization devoted to supporting grassroots, national, and international movements for transformative social change. 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.
