Tara JensenAlumna class of '06

Tara Jensen’s choice of law school was easily made when she searched online for the “most radical law school in the country,” and found CUNY Law among those at the top of the list.

“I fell in love with CUNY. Walking through the halls, I immediately thought: I am going here,” she recalled. “Everyone at CUNY came there with a purpose. They had specific causes they cared about, ideas to pursue; they knew what they believed in.”

Jensen had a strong desire to go into social justice service to help those in need before she became a lawyer. Coming from working-class roots, she was the first from her family to go to college. After graduating, she worked in homeless shelters, helping some of the mothers there find work.

“Employment is very important to any sort of economic justice. When you have [that], you can work for social justice. When you can’t feed your family, you can’t be expected to participate in any meaningful way to better the world,” she said.

It was Jensen’s work at a mental health clinic, though, that drove her to seek a law degree. The clinic was a last stop for parents in danger of losing their children to child service organizations.

“We couldn’t show up and represent [our clients] in any sort of legal way,” said Jensen. “It inspired me to go to law school. I thought, these are the issues I’m interested in. I would be able to more effectively represent the populations that I cared about if I had this extra degree.”

Now, Jensen and her firm represent plaintiffs mainly in federal court, taking on employment discrimination cases under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as well as comparable state and city civil rights laws.

It can be intimidating for workers to stand up for their rights when they have to go toe-to-toe with the “big companies with teams of lawyers who try to out-resource” the plaintiff, said Jensen.

“We stand up for these workers, [putting] our resources behind them and sending a clear message to these corporations that they are not above the law. In times of economic crisis, corporations can treat workers as disposable. They can fire someone unlawfully and then turn to a long line of people who are desperate for work.”

Her clients are janitors and security guards with race discrimination claims, female professors getting paid less than their male colleagues, and young women enduring sexual harassment from older bosses. They are immigrants being paid unlawfully low wages, who are forced to accept them for fear of deportation. They are workers in both the private and public sectors who are discriminated against on the basis of disability, age, religion, or sexual orientation.

Employers trying to defend their own discriminatory actions, Jensen said, will call into question a client’s “work ethic, skills, and careers they’ve spent years building—their contributions to a productive society. It’s always: ‘I didn’t fire him because he is black; I fired him because he was bad at his job.’”

Looking back, Jensen appreciated CUNY Law’s Equality Concentration for its practical training, especially Professor Rick Rossein’s mock trials, which provided federal litigation experience.

“CUNY is training real lawyers, who are going into really hard environments, where you’re fighting uphill the whole time,” she said.