Bill Quigley is a law professor and Director of the Stuart H. Smith Law Clinic and Center for Social Justice and the Gillis Long Poverty Law Center at Loyola University New Orleans. Bill has been an active public interest lawyer since 1977. Bill has served as counsel with a wide range of public interest organizations on issues including human rights, Katrina social justice issues, public housing, voting rights, death penalty, living wage, civil liberties, educational reform, constitutional rights and civil disobedience. Bill served as the Legal Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights for two years and has litigated numerous cases with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., the Advancement Project, and with the ACLU of Louisiana, for which he served as General Counsel for 15 years.
Bill teaches in the clinic and also teaches courses in Law and Poverty, Social Justice Lawyering, Community Lawyering, and Catholic Social Teaching and Law. His research and writing has focused on living wage, the right to a job, legal services, community organizing as part of effective lawyering, civil disobedience, high stakes testing, international human rights, revolutionary lawyering and a continuing history of how the laws have regulated the poor since colonial times. He has served as an advisor on human and civil rights to Human Rights Watch USA, Amnesty International USA, and served as the Chair of the Louisiana Advisory Committee to the US Commission on Civil Rights. He has also been an active volunteer lawyer with School of the Americas Watch and the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti.
Bill is the author of Ending Poverty As We Know It: Guaranteeing A Right to A Job At A Living Wage (Temple University Press, 2003) and Storms Still Raging: Katrina, New Orleans and Social Justice (2008). In 2003, he was named the Pope Paul VI National Teacher of Peace by Pax Christi USA. He is the recipient of the 2004 SALT Teaching Award presented by the Society of American Law Teachers; the 2006 Camille Gravel Civil Pro Bono Award from the Federal Bar Association New Orleans; the 2006 Stanford Law School National Public Service Award; the 2006 National Lawyers Guild Ernie Goodman award; the 2007 University of California School of Law, Boalt Hall, Social Justice Scholar in Residence; the 2009 Northeastern University School of Law Daynard Public Interest Visiting Fellow; the 2011 Activist-Scholar Award of the Urban Affairs Association; and the 2011 Fordham University School of Law Louis J. Lefkowitz Public Service Award.
Bill Quigley 