News Archive

Professor Florence Wagman Roisman was invited to speak at the "Symposium to End Poverty & Inequality" held by the University of the District of Columbia's David A. Clarke School of Law. The Symposium takes place April 7th to 9th. Roisman will speak at the concluding session on Saturday, April 8.

Professor Roisman teaches property and housing law courses, as well as a civil rights law course. She has focused her practice, teaching, and writing on low-income housing, homelessness, and housing discrimination and segregation issues.

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, Catholic University, and Widener University; she has taught part-time at the George Washington University National Law Center and the Antioch School of Law. In addition to Property and Land Use Planning, she has taught Civil Procedure and Administrative Law. In 2002, she received a Trustee's Teaching Award from Indiana University.

In 2000, she received the Thurgood Marshall Award given by the District of Columbia Bar. In 1989, she was the first recipient of the Kutak-Dodds Prize, awarded by the ABA's Standing Committee on Legal Aid and Indigent Defendants and the National Legal Aid and Defender Association. Professor Roisman also received the 2004 Equal Justice Works Outstanding Law School Faculty Award "for her dogged pursuit of equal justice and her pivotal role in nurturing a public interest ethic among law students." She was recognized with this national award on Thursday, October 28, 2004 in Washington, DC.

Prof. Roisman is the Michael D. McCormick Professor of Law. She has published widely on the topic of housing discrimination. Her most recent law review article was "National Ingratitude: The Egregious Deficiences of the United States' Housing Programs for Veterans and the 'Public Scandal' of Veterans' Homelessness," 38 Indiana Law Review 103 (2005).