Florence Roisman

Florence Wagman Roisman is the William F. Harvey Professor of Law at Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law. She is best known for her work in low-income housing, homelessness, and housing discrimination and segregation. In the fall of 2006, Roisman was the Skelly Wright Fellow at Yale Law School.

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 said 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.

In 2005 Roisman was accused of opposing the tenure of Prof. William Bradford because of some of his conservative views. The feud became a national one when Fox News and FrontPage Magazine, among others, continually reported on the controversy. Bradford claimed that his support of the Iraq War and his refusal to sign a letter in defense of Ward Churchill that was circulated by Roisman were contributing factors and that Roisman "engineered" the vote against him. Roisman has publicly denied most of Bradford's claims.

In December 2005, retired Army Lt. Col. Keith R. Donnelly, then a recent IU McKinney law grad, contacted The Indianapolis Star, suspicious of Bradford's claims that he served in Desert Storm and that he had been awarded a Silver Star. Both Donnelly and the Star independently requested Bradford's army records, which "showed he was in the Army reserve from Sept. 30, 1995, to Oct. 23, 2001. He was discharged as a second lieutenant. He had no active duty. He was in military intelligence, not infantry. He received no awards." (For reference, Desert Storm started on August 2, 1990, and ended February 28, 1991.) Bradford resigned, effective January 1, 2006.

Awards
In 2010 Roisman was awarded the "Servant of Justice Award" by the Legal Aid Society of the District of Columbia.

In 2011 she received the Cushing Niles Dolbeare Lifetime Service Award from the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

In 2014 she received the M. Shanara Gilbert Human Rights Award from the Society of American Law Teachers (SALT). She was given the award during the group’s annual dinner in New York City.