Hueston Hennigan LLP, a California-based law firm, has launched a national legal foundation focused on social justice.

With the help of a $10 million pledge from the firm's partners, the Social Justice Legal Foundation will work to develop fresh approaches to national trial work that advances human rights and racial equity by combining public interest issue expertise with private-sector experience. To that end, the foundation, in collaboration with the law schools at Columbia, Northwestern, Stanford, UCLA, and Yale, as well as social justice organizations and bar associations, will bring to trial difficult and important cases, rotating its primary focus every two years among the following areas: economic justice, housing/homelessness, LGBTQ+ rights, immigrant justice, discrimination against Native Americans, voting rights, and criminal justice reform. The foundation also will sponsor five promising law school graduates as Hueston Hennigan Fellows for two-year terms.

"We are excited to collaborate on this first-in-the-nation initiative," said advisory board member Erica Smock, Dean for Social Justice Initiatives & Public Service Lawyering at Columbia Law School. "We look forward to SJLF's meaningful contributions to the broad network of public interest organizations [that] have been focused on the fight for social justice and equality."

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