The Anti-Discrimination Center (ADC), founded and led by Craig Gurian, has been litigating, strategizing, and advocating in support of aggressive and maximally protective civil rights enforcement since 2003.
Gurian, ADC Executive Director and Editor of the Remapping Debate, a public policy news website, has practiced anti-discrimination law since 1988. In private practice, Gurian successfully litigated the first Title IX sex harassment case tried to a jury in the United States. His most recent publication is “Taking Seriously Title VII’s 'Floor, Not a Ceiling' Invitation," in A Nation of Widening Opportunities? The Civil Rights Act at Fifty (Bagenstos and Katz, eds., University of Michigan Press 2014), forthcoming.
ADC’s motto is “one community, no exclusion,” and it operates on the principle that crossing boundaries of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status and geography is perhaps the most essential requisite for building a better society. The organization acts on its belief that the twin poisons of essentialism and localism are increasingly compromising the goal of moving the civil rights struggle forward
Among its accomplishments, ADC drafted and led a broad coalition to pass NYC’s 2005 Local Civil Rights Restoration Act. On Long Island, ADC served as counsel for ERASE Racism in its successful effort to help Nassau County develop and pass a greatly strengthened comprehensive Fair Housing Law in 2006, which took effect in 2007. The new law provides stronger protections, including the addition of source of income (such as rental subsidies) to the protected classes; civil penalties of up to $50,000; and local enforcement, including the opportunity for victims to have their cases heard by a local Administrative Law Judge. Local enforcement was a major change because it allows for investigation on the local level, rather than through the NYS Division of Human Rights process.
ADC is best known for its unprecedented legal strategy of using the False Claims Act to successfully sue Westchester County for having defrauded the federal government by having falsely represented that it was affirmatively furthering fair housing. This litigation, developed and co-counseled by Craig Gurian, yielded an historic housing desegregation consent decree. ADC has charged Westchester with ongoing violations and it has continued to alert the civil rights community to the need to demand that the promise of the decree be vindicated.
ADC continues to exercise leadership in promoting an agenda that affirmatively furthers fair housing, challenging HUD’s proposed fair housing rules as inadequate, and working with developers of affordable housing on strategies to break down the barriers to building multiple-dwelling housing with maximum desegregation potential in jurisdictions that traditionally have excluded such housing.
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