Chicago Appleseed at NACM 2016 presenting on Criminal Justice Reform

At this year's National Association of Case Management (NACM) conference in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (July 10-14) Ali Abid, Senior Criminal Justice Policy Analyst at Chicago Appleseed Fund for Justice and Peter Coolsen, Court Administrator for the Criminal Division of the Circuit Court of Cook Count...
July 11, 2016

New Book Looks at Racial Injustice in the Cook County Courts

On May 11th, Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve spoke at University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration about her new book, Crook County: Racism and Injustice in America’s Largest Criminal Court. (Stanford Law Books). Before a packed auditorium, Van Cleve, a Temple University criminal justic...
June 8, 2016

Law Schools and the Duty of Pro Bono Service

Recently, the Wall Street Journal ran a short piece commenting on The Imposition of Social Justice Morality in Legal Education by Julie D. Lawton in Volume 4, Issue 1 of the 2016 Indiana Journal of Law and Social Equity. Ms. Lawton is an associate Clinical Professor of Law and the Director of the Ho...
May 31, 2016

Report on the Impact of Court Fines, Fees and Costs

The Collaboration for Justice—the joint social justice effort of Chicago Appleseed Fund for Justice and the Chicago Council of Lawyers—has released a report on the impact and legality of court fines, fees and costs. The report details how the recent trend of shifting court costs to low-income and in...
May 26, 2016

Cook County Domestic Relations Court Changes

Chicago Appleseed Fund for Justice has been working with a task force for the Presiding Judge of the Domestic Relations Division, Grace Dickler, for several years to improve the court. The work has been very rewarding and plans for a pilot courtroom based upon our work have been approved for 2016. I...
December 14, 2015