Why It’s Time for a Civil Right to Counsel, with John Pollock

John Pollock

John Pollock is a staff attorney for the Public Justice Center who has served since 2009 as the coordinator of the National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel. His work focuses on working to establish the right to counsel for low-income individuals in civil cases involving basic human needs such as child custody, housing, and benefits. He is the author of ABA Resolution 114 (2018), supporting the right to counsel whenever physical liberty is at stake. He is the recipient of the 2018 Innovations Award from the National Legal Aid and Defender Association and serves on an advisory committee for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Prior to his work at the Public Justice Center, John served as the enforcement director for the Central Alabama Fair Housing Center in Montgomery, Alabama, where he addressed systemic housing discrimination in rental, sales, lending, and insurance. John also previously served as a law fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama. While there, he founded the Heirs’ Property Retention Coalition, a network of dozens of organizations across the southeastern United States working on stopping the forced sales of ancestral property within low-income African-American communities. John drafted the first version of what eventually became the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act, a uniform law to reduce forced sales that has been adopted by over a dozen states. John graduated from Wesleyan University in 1994 and from Northeastern University School of Law in 2005.