Doug Lasdon

In 1984, Doug Lasdon founded the Urban Justice Center as a one-person operation in a burned-out building in East Harlem, to provide badly needed legal services to one of New York City's most underserved populations – single, homeless adults. To make his services accessible to his clients, he conducted outreach legal clinics directly in soup kitchens, making us the first organization in the country to use this approach.

Since then, Doug has greatly expanded the agency's size, scope, and influence, while still holding fast to its core mission – helping those at the farthest margins of society, both one at a time and collectively.  The UJC now has twelve Projects and over two-hundred staff members.

Prior to founding the Urban Justice Center, Doug was a Fellow and Staff Attorney at Covenant House in New York City. He has been an adjunct faculty member at New York University since 1987, and has also served as a consultant to the World Bank, and as a Wasserstein Fellow at Harvard Law School. He spent the Fall 2017 semester as the Distinguished Practitioner in Residence at Cornell Law, from which he received his law degreee. His undergraduate degree is from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.