Biography
As a lawyer and urban planner, Justin integrates these two fields to study legal and spatial dimensions of socio-economic inequality. Justin analyzes processes of geographic inclusion and exclusion at the scales of the building, the neighborhood, and the city, particularly how these processes work, what they mean for those who are subject to them, and how to translate findings into policy. In recent publications, he has explored these relationships between space, power, and inequality in the context of immigration federalism, residential segregation, lending discrimination, environmental justice, climate change and housing, and mass incarceration.
Justin previously clerked for federal trial and appellate judges where he worked on civil and criminal cases in wide variety of areas, from civil rights to national security, from financial regulation to environmental protection. Before graduate school, Justin worked as a community-based planner for an environmental justice organization focusing on brownfield redevelopment, as the advocacy director for a non-profit fighting predatory lending practices, as the program manager for a project bringing youth and prisoners into critical dialogues about justice, and of the trainer for a domestic violence crisis center instructing police in Ciudad Juárez how to support of survivors of sexual assault.
