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The Cahn Justice Innovation Center at the David A. Clarke School of Law

An independent, activist think tank, associated with the David A. Clarke School of Law's legal clinic, serving as the incubator and home for new ideas, new approaches, new partnerships, and new strategies of law practice to address the fundamental causes of inequality and disenfranchisement.

The David A. Clarke School of Law building

Organizing an HBCU center of excellence in law and artificial intelligence.

The Cahn Justice Innovation Center is organizing a center of excellence in law and artificial intelligence to redress the deficit in technology, research, and investment in Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) [20 U.S.C. § 1061(2)]; to answer both the investment gap and the larger threat that artificial intelligence presents to civil rights and opportunity. The center is intended to serve Clarke, other HBCU law schools, and the larger HBCU network.

UDC Law HBCU chenille patch The David A. Clarke School of Law — one of six HBCU law schools in the country

AI: The New Civil Rights Challenge

Artificial intelligence is the frontier on which Black economic mobility will now be won or lost.

HBCUs Have Been Here Before

The legal strategy that ended Jim Crow segregation was built at HBCUs.

At Howard University's School of Law, Charles Hamilton Houston trained many of the lawyers who would litigate Brown v. Board of Education and the numerous cases that preceded and would follow Brown — Thurgood Marshall among them.

Charles Hamilton Houston
Charles Hamilton Houston
Thurgood Marshall
Thurgood Marshall
Civil Rights & Technology, 1954–Today
1954
Brown v. Board
Legal segregation struck down
1964
Civil Rights Act
Discrimination in employment and public life outlawed
1965
Voting Rights Act
Federal protection for the right to vote
1968
Fair Housing Act
Housing discrimination banned
1970s–80s
Automated Public Benefits
Welfare systems begin prioritizing denial over access
1990s–2000s
Machine Learning
Statistical scoring models spread through housing, lending, and hiring
2010s
Deep Learning
Neural networks begin learning patterns directly from raw data
2020s
Generative AI & Large Language Models
Bias scales across every institution at once
Today
The Next Civil Rights Frontier
Legal strategy must meet algorithmic scale
Source: Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor, 2018

This is the unfinished business of the HBCU movement.

The Evidence

Algorithmic bias doesn't require intent to discriminate. It learns bias from data shaped by generations of discrimination, exclusion, and prejudice.

Housing

Tenant-screening algorithms reject qualified Black applicants — often with no explanation or chance to appeal.

Lending

Underwriting and credit-scoring models trained on biased data exclude creditworthy Black borrowers.

Employment

Résumé filters disproportionately screen out qualified Black applicants.

Source: Pappoe, Humber & Pantoja-Benavides — The Leadership Conference, Center for Civil Rights & Technology, 2026

AI is projected to increase the Black-white wealth gap by $43B a year by 2045.

$0Kvs$0K
Median household net worth, white vs. Black households, 2022
$0B/yr
Projected widening of the racial wealth gap by 2045

McKinsey projects generative AI could add roughly $500 billion in U.S. household wealth by 2045 — but on the current path, Black households would capture far less than their share, widening the gap rather than closing it.

The Investment Gap

The nation's investments in AI education have almost entirely bypassed HBCUs — the schools that disproportionately train America's Black scientists, engineers, and lawyers.

A sophisticated AI research environment with a humanoid robot, multi-monitor data displays, and a neural-network hologram
The scale of infrastructure this level of investment builds — and the scale HBCUs are shut out of
57 HBCUs receiving
federal R&D funding, FY2023
$539.5M
MIT Schwarzman College
of Computing, one gift, 2018
$1.1B
Every HBCU in the country
combined endowment
$2–4B
Harvard
endowment alone, FY2025
$56.9B
0.91%
Of federal university R&D reached HBCUs (FY2023) — HBCUs are 3.2% of all four-year institutions
$2–4B
Combined endowment of every HBCU in the country. Only one exceeds $1B — 148 other U.S. institutions do
$56.9B
Harvard's endowment alone (FY2025) — the world's largest at a single university
0 of ~29
NSF National AI Research Institutes ever led by an HBCU, as of 2026

The Response

01

Redress the Deficit

Build the artificial-intelligence research, technology, and investment base at HBCUs.

02

Lead

Develop the thought leaders and architects now shaping the field's rights, work, and opportunity.

03

Meet the Threat

Confront the risks artificial intelligence poses to civil rights, economic opportunity, and access to justice.

Three Operating Divisions

The Center's Three Operating Divisions

Investigate

Algorithmic Forensics Bureau

Audits, rates, and certifies AI systems for fairness.

Invent

Justice Design Lab

Builds and incubates new tools and platforms.

Envision

NextGen Law Institute

Trains technology-fluent practitioners and leaders.

Photo Needed — Campus / Classroom
Current photography of the David A. Clarke School of Law in active use — students, faculty, or classroom/clinic space. Should show the Center's work grounded in a real, occupied institution rather than as an abstraction. Landscape orientation, min. 1600px wide.
Investigate, Envision, Invent, Evolve

A center of excellence combining four functions, each one feeding the next — investigation informs strategy, strategy enables invention of tools, tools are tested in the real world, and what's learned informs the next investigation.

Justice.
Innovation.
Impact.
New findings and methodologies inform strategies and education.
Envisioned innovations provide design elements.
Innovations are incubated and tested in the real world.
Scientific and community insights feed back into ratings and audits.

The Center's Access to Justice Council, comprised of Legal Services lawyers and their clients, reviews the Center's work to assess whether it is reaching the communities it's meant to serve.

Photos Needed — Board & Leadership
Portrait grid of key Board and leadership figures (e.g., Reuben Camper Cahn, Dr. Victor B. Lawrence, Angela Gilmore, Wade Henderson, Jim Sandman). Consistent headshot framing, neutral background, min. 600px square per portrait.

The Center's Research Consortium, a standing body of the world's leading researchers in artificial intelligence, computational social science, and complex systems, developing three new legal domains, NextGen Civil Rights, NextGen Economic Infrastructure, and NextGen Access to Justice.

Our Founding Commitment

This Law School Is Not Morally Neutral

1972 · Antioch School of Law
“As a professional school we are inescapably committed to those values central to the legal profession, lessons we know through centuries of resistance to injustice and to arbitrary power.”
— Edgar S. Cahn and Jean Camper Cahn, Antioch School of Law Inaugural Convocation, 1972
1972
Antioch School of Law
Founded by Edgar S. Cahn and Jean Camper Cahn on the principle stated above.
Since
David A. Clarke School of Law
The mission continues at the University of the District of Columbia.
2026
The Cahn Justice Innovation Center
The next chapter of that founding commitment.

Join Us in Bringing This Vision to Life.

As the world races toward automation, intentional leadership is more urgent than ever. The Cahn Justice Innovation Center carries the Cahns' founding commitment into the algorithmic era.

Founding Partners
Fuel the Center's growth through catalytic, founding-level funding that establishes the Research Consortium and the Center's first operating divisions.
Research Consortium Members
Join leading researchers and technologists co-developing rights-centered AI tools, methodologies, and open-source frameworks alongside the Center's divisions.
Institutional Allies
Partner as an HBCU, law school, or civil rights organization co-designing the Center's tools, curricula, and audit frameworks alongside our own.

Together, we can bend the arc of artificial intelligence toward justice.

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