The Community Justice Legal Project (CJLP) is the newest pro bono initiative offered by the Public Interest Office and funded by the George Barrett Social Justice Program. The student-led project works in collaboration with the McGruder Family Resource Center in North Nashville and seeks to eliminate the civil legal barriers that frequently hinder reintegration and stability for individuals and their families after involvement with the justice system. These include issues around housing, child custody, employment discrimination, and voting rights.
“Of course, people who are involved in the criminal justice system have an attorney that represents them on criminal matters, but there are a lot of collateral consequences that happen as a result of being in jail that affect your life otherwise,” explained Beth Cruz, Assistant Dean and Martha Craig Daughtrey Director for Public Interest. “As they come back into the community, it can be very hard to find a place to live, to get a job, and to get their basic needs met.”
The project is led by students Anna Espinoza ’26, Elizabeth Wehby ‘26, and Olivia Hatch ’27, under the guidance of faculty advisor Professor Alissa Heydari and supervising attorney Andrew Ross ‘09. The students offer two-hour sessions at the McGruder Center on the first Wednesday of every month, delivering a specialized “Know Your Rights” workshop presentation intended to equip community members with helpful information about some of the most common legal issues they may face. The presentations are followed by one-on-one assistance, where people can receive supervised assistance from law students about their individual legal concerns.
Ross’s presence and participation allow the law students to legally provide supervised, limited-scope advice to community members. In preparation for each workshop, students research the relevant area of law they’ll present, translate it into accessible language, and have it reviewed by Ross for legal accuracy.
The project is still in its early stages, but the team has already fielded residents’ questions related to driver’s license restoration, expungement of prior records, housing issues, and employment barriers. When matters fall outside their scope—such as criminal, family, or immigration cases—they connect residents with appropriate referrals. The students hope to extend their focus to address additional legal issues that fall between outlined rights to counsel and everyday civil matters.
“When you’re faced with criminal charges, you have the right to an attorney, but you don’t have that right with respect to these civil issues,” said Wehby. “Whether someone’s been formally incarcerated or not, there are just so many legal issues that people might not even realize are legal issues or have no idea where to start. What court do I go to? Who can I contact? Do I even have a claim here, or is this just a completely moot point? That is kind of the space we’re trying to fill—issues that you don’t have the right to an attorney for, but they’re very prevalent.”
The project, which launched last academic year, grew out of a proposal from students Grace Hayes ‘25, Sophia Howard ‘25, and Adom Abatkun ‘25, who sought to provide civil legal support to community members navigating incarceration and reintegration in Davidson County. The students were motivated in part by the county’s high incarceration rates—highlighted by a 2018 Brookings Institution study which found that Nashville’s 37203 zip code had the highest incarceration rate in the nation at 14 percent.
The decision to house the CJLP at the McGruder Center was very intentional, Dean Cruz noted, because the center operates as a multi-service hub, offering job training programs, a food pantry, educational workshops, housing support, and counseling alongside a range of other community resources. The center was already well embedded in the North Nashville community and deeply trusted by residents, allowing the project to provide civil legal assistance locally in a familiar space.
Espinoza, Wehby, and Hatch—who have previously worked in post-conviction and public defense roles and plan to continue in public service after graduation—represent a minority of law school graduates who pursue public interest careers instead of private practice. That reality, they said, makes Vanderbilt’s hands-on, community-based opportunities like CJLP especially valuable for professional development, building a cohort of committed peers, and sustaining a shared sense of purpose toward public service.
“We have the opportunity to sit with people, talk about their lives, and talk about these issues that they’re bringing us, but also how it’s making them feel,” Espinoza said. “That’s learning a different type of client-interviewing that’s less focused on talking about the legal issues and more on just getting to know people as individuals. I think that is really unique to our project.”
CJLP also offers students a chance to apply classroom doctrine in real-world settings while being involved members of the Nashville community. These experiences develop practical lawyering skills that will serve them well regardless of their career path.
“The out-of-the-classroom experiences have probably been more formative in my year and a half in law school than the in-class, doctrinal experiences,” Hatch said. “There are real people behind these cases. In just being able to spend half an hour or an email conversation or a quick phone call with them, we hope and strive to be very responsive to them. I feel like I’m actually a part of the community that I’m going to live in for these three years or so.”
Dean Cruz reiterated this, explaining that this type of engagement helps students develop valuable legal, interpersonal, and ethical skills.
“It develops critical legal skills,” she said. “You not only need to know the law to be an effective lawyer, but you need to know how to interact with clients and do so in a way that puts them first, makes them comfortable, enables them to tell you their difficult stories, and recognizes that we all come from different places and bridges that gap. The more experience you get serving in that way, the better lawyer you’re going to be, regardless of whether you’re serving as a public defender or in a firm.”
As CJLP builds momentum, its leaders are looking ahead to bringing in more law students to broaden the project’s capacity at McGruder. They aim to expand the size and scope of the “Know Your Rights” presentations and simply engage with more residents overall, becoming established providers in the community for trusted legal advice.
For the team and Dean Cruz, success will be measured primarily by whether the program is providing the informative services the community says it needs most. It also depends on whether students find the work genuinely enriching for their legal training and growth as individuals.
“Each person you meet and each person you help just teaches you a little bit more about communicating with people in these situations—how to be a better advocate, how to be a better listener, and how to be a better lawyer,” Wehby said.
CJLP represents the latest addition to Vanderbilt Law School’s pro bono and public interest opportunities, joining existing initiatives including the Woodbine Immigration Project, the Shade Tree Medical-Legal Partnership, and the Street Law program. In recent years, Ross has seen more students at Vanderbilt and at large considering public service as a viable path after graduation.
“From what I’ve learned from hearing students talk, there’s more of a network of folks who are pursuing public interest,” Ross said. “There are more events, and there’s been a creation of more of a community, so the choice will seem less foreign to people. As that grows, hopefully, there will be more and more public interest that comes out of Vanderbilt.”
Dean Cruz added, “Part of our mission in the Public Interest Office is to not only help our students dedicated to public service find meaningful and impactful careers, but it’s also for the whole community to find a way to practice law for the greater good—wherever they are and in whatever practice area, private or public. If you can start building those habits during law school, you’re likely to carry them into your career. We want to instill a sense of service and a habit of service.”