The Law Reform Unit builds upon the needs of individual clients to make systemic changes through litigation and advocacy that benefit large numbers of clients with similar legal problems. Through class actions and other affirmative litigation, we seek to enforce the rights of many similarly situated persons or to establish new legal rights. The unit’s active affirmative law reform litigation docket includes 27 cases that benefit virtually the entire population of low-income New Yorkers.

This Unit conducts impact litigation and advocates for legislative and regulatory reform on behalf of New Yorkers in need on a host of civil legal issues, including benefits, immigration, health law, homelessness, and employment.

Our Impact

Defending the Right to Shelter
The Adams Administration sought to use the recent influx of migrants as an excuse to undermine the right to shelter that has existed since Legal Aid’s landmark 1981 victory in Callahan v. Carey. We reached a settlement with the City that preserves the right to shelter for all New Yorkers, including recent arrivals, and creates procedures for new migrants to seek continuing help while they apply for asylum and seek employment and permanent housing. We filed supporting papers in the case that stopped Mayor Adams from allowing ICE to open an office on Rikers Island.

Expanding Housing Subsidies
In 2024, we sued the Adams Administration for refusing to implement historic new City laws that would provide housing subsidies to thousands of desperate tenants facing eviction from long-term apartments. An appeals court upheld our claims after a wrongful dismissal at the trial level, and we are opposing Mayor Adams’s attempts to seek a further appeal that will delay assistance urgently needed by our clients.

Fighting Discrimination against Section 8 recipients
We are enforcing the City’s laws against source of income discrimination against dozens of landlords and real estate brokers in both state and federal court. A federal judge recently upheld our right to pursue the claim that the defendants’ conduct also constituted racial discrimination against persons of color with housing subsidies.

Defending Rent Regulation
We represented tenant groups intervening in five different federal cases that challenged the constitutionality of New York’s longstanding rent stabilization system. If successful, these cases would have eliminated affordable housing for over a million families. Thanks to a strong partnership between New York State, New York City, and the tenants, all five cases were dismissed at the trial and appellate court level, and all were rejected by the US Supreme Court.

Securing timely benefits for vulnerable families
In 2023, we filed two class action cases to end the City’s outrageous delays in providing cash, food stamps and rental assistance to New York’s most desperate and vulnerable families. As a result, the City has substantially eliminated the backlog in processing food stamp and cash assistance applications and renewals, including emergency applications, and significantly reduced waiting times for clients seeking telephone interviews. We continue to seek additional systemic reforms of City procedures.

Defending NYCHA Residents
In the past two years, NYCHA residents have lived through some of the most brutal winters on record, at times without any heat or hot water. Decades of mismanagement and poor funding has left buildings across the city almost unlivable. We are taking a stand for these tenants. In the past year, we have pushed for rent abatements for NYCHA tenants who were left in the cold. We have created informational materials to help people get help. With nearly 600,000 NYCHA residents across the city, we are making sure that all New Yorkers have a safe place to stay

Learn more about our casework on The Legal Aid Society litigation docket.