Jean Camper Cahn is a lawyer who helped establish federal financing of legal services to the poor and was a co-founder of the Antioch School of Law, the predecessor to the University of the District of Columbia’s David A. Clarke School of Law.
The Antioch School of Law was established in 1972 by Jean Camper Cahn and Edgar S. Cahn, a married interracial couple dedicated to improving legal services for the underprivileged.
The Council of the District of Columbia later passed legislation merging the School of Law with the University of the District of Columbia in 1996. In 1998, President Clinton signed legislation renaming the school after former D.C. Council Chair David A. Clarke, a civil rights leader, former Chair of the Council of the District of Columbia, and long-time advocate for the law school and its mission.
Cahn spent most of her career pursuing legal and social causes in Washington, where she and her husband lived for two decades. She devoted her career to social causes, a calling that was probably sparked by growing up in a family of activists.
Cahn’s father, Dr. John E. T. Camper, a physician in Baltimore, was a founder of the first chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in that city, where she was born and raised. Regular visitors to the home included Thurgood Marshall, the first black Justice of the United States Supreme Court, and the singer Paul Robeson, who was her godfather.
She began university at Northwestern and later transferred to and graduated from Swarthmore, then proceeded to earn an LL.B. at Yale Law School. She also studied at Cambridge in England on a Fulbright fellowship. Returning to New Haven, Cahn served as associate general counsel for the New Haven Redevelopment Agency and in the country’s first neighborhood legal services program, the Dixwell offices of Community Progress Inc.
1965 saw the publication of the Cahns’ landmark article for the Yale Law Journal, The War on Poverty: A Civilian Perspective, which proposed a national system of legal services to the poor. This program lasted until 1974 when it was replaced by the Legal Services Corporation. In 1972, the Cahns founded the Antioch School of Law which emphasized public interest law.
Up until her death, she continued to teach and practice law.
At the age of 55, Cahn died Jan. 2, 1991 of breast cancer in her home in Miami Beach.
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