Law
Centers and Institutes
Domestic Violence Institute (DVI)
Executive Director: Lois Kanter, School of Law Senior Clinical Specialist
A nationally recognized education, service and research organization based in the School of Law that combats domestic violence by providing legal advocacy services to battered women and training lawyers and other professionals to work effectively with victims of abuse. DVI provides clinical training opportunities for law students who can participate in an intensive abuse prevention clinic at Dorchester District Court or interview women patients in the Boston Medical Center's Emergency Department and provide them with appropriate violence prevention services. DVI is a founding partner of the Dorchester Community Roundtable, a national demonstration project funded with a $1.4 million grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It seeks to strengthen advocacy services to battered women; sponsor new programs to assist children who witness violence in their homes; create education and intervention programs directed toward teen dating violence; and identify effective strategies for intervening with perpetrators. Its success led the Department of Justice to award Dorchester a $9 million, five-year grant to create a model Domestic Violence Court; Northeastern faculty serve on the court’s advisory board and supervise its Civil Advocacy Office.
With the Women’s Bar Association of Massachusetts, DVI has developed a Family Law Network that supports attorneys who represent battered women in complex child custody, support and visitation cases. This network, developed with funding from the Soros Foundation, links the law school with family law practitioners and battered women through an interactive Web site that provides comprehensive online legal resources. In addition, Northeastern faculty teach a Family Law Litigation seminar on the challenges that battered women face in family law courts. A post-graduate fellowship program offers new lawyers the opportunity to participate in DVI’s work and train as domestic violence advocates and clinical researchers. Founded in 1993.
Directors: Jack McDevitt, Associate Dean of Graduate Studies, College of Criminal Justice
This interdisciplinary research institute combines faculty and professional staff from the College of Criminal Justice, the School of Law and the College of Arts and Sciences. At the forefront of the national dialogue about race and social policy, the Institute engages in research that examines the influence of race on important questions of social justice and the structural causes of racial injustice. The Institute’s six faculty and research associates from criminal justice, law, sociology and anthropology, education, and African-American studies focus on understanding the connections among individual bias, institutional policies and disparate treatment in the criminal justice and education systems. Research areas include racial disparities in criminal sentencing, jury selection, and school expulsions; urban school safety and discipline; racial profiling; and hate crimes. The Institute has developed a community advisory board whose 15 members have public policy expertise in criminal justice and education; this board assists in developing a significant social justice research agenda and incorporates community perspective in the research process. The Institute has received funding from the Massachusetts Executive Office of Public Safety to be the academic institution to conduct its statewide racial profiling data analysis; the Attorney General of Rhode Island, to conduct an analysis of Rhode Island traffic stop data; Providence Police Department, to conduct a racial profiling analysis for the city of Providence. Founded in 2001.
Public Health Advocacy Institute (PHAI)
Chair:Dick Daynard, Professor of Law
PHAI is an interdisciplinary research and advocacy institute created by the Northeastern University School of Law and Graduate Programs in Public Health at Tufts University School of Medicine. The Institute seeks to increase the legal field’s understanding of public health and help ensure that legal decisions take into account public health goals. It provides co-op opportunities for law students to conduct interdisciplinary research and work with faculty and other professionals on advocacy projects. PHAI’s nine faculty from law and medicine are introducing public health issues into law school curricula (looking at how laws and legal decisions affect the health of populations); advocating for the disclosure of information uncovered in legal proceedings that affects public health (e.g., Ford-Firestone tire cases, tobacco industry liability suits); developing an archive about automobile hazards for public health professionals, attorneys and legislators to use to push the automobile industry to manufacture safer vehicles; publishing articles and filing legal briefs that infuse public health perspectives into public policy deliberations and arguments in important legal cases; and exploring the potential of legal strategies to reduce the food industry’s processing and marketing practices that encourage excessive food consumption and lead to obesity. PHAI was founded in 2001 with a core grant from the Bauman Foundation.