Mark A. Dann

Mark A. Dann is the fifth recipient of the George N. Lindsay Civil Rights Fellowship and works in the Education Project here at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

Mark is a 2002 Graduate of Seton Hall University School of Law where he was President of the Public Interest Network, a founding member of Seton Hall’s American Constitution Society Chapter, and an active participant in the National Campaign to Restore Civil Rights. While there, he was also the recipient of the Seton Hall Pro Bono Service Award and was awarded two consecutive Seton Hall Public Interest Fellowships through which he was able to intern with the Transnational, Major Crimes, and Civil Rights Division of the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, the Special Litigation Unit of the Juvenile Rights Division of the Legal Aid Society of New York, and the Education Project of the Lawyers’ Committee. During his final year in law school, Mark also represented indigent clients while working as a student attorney in the Civil Litigation Clinic of the Seton Hall Center for Social Justice.

Intent on pursuing a career in public interest, Mark tailored his law school course load accordingly. He not only enrolled in courses in which he had a personal interest such as Equality in American Law, Latino/a Critical Race Theory, and Law & Public Education, a seminar taught by Professor Paul L. Trachtenberg at Rutgers University School of Law, but he also took rigorous electives like federal courts, civil rights, conflict of laws, and administrative law as well. Indeed, Mark graduated having amassed well over the law school’s minimum number of required credits. In addition to his academic work, Mark served on the Seton Hall Appellate Advocacy Moot Court Board. Mark competed in the 2001 Eugene Gressman Moot Court Competition where he and his partner reached the quarter finals and Mark was named overall Best Oralist Second Runner Up, and he also competed in and reached the final round of the 2002 Northeast Regional American Bar Association Representation in Mediation Competition where he and another partner tied the opposing team for first place.

As a Research Assistant, Mark collaborated with professors on a number of complex issues ranging from Title VIII predatory lending claims to Title VII employment discrimination actions and assisted in the drafting of articles such as Marc R. Poirier, Hastening the Kulturkampf: Boy Scouts of America v. Dale and the Politics of American Masculinity, 12 Law & Sexuality 271 (2002). However, Mark has also written a number of papers himself, including an extensive review of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s jurisprudence and comprehensive commentaries on issues such as student expressive rights, de facto school segregation, and the Equal Educational Opportunities Act, 20 U.S.C. § 1701 et seq.

Presently, Mark is responsible for working on the Lawyers’ Committee’s cases challenging systemic school discrimination and segregation like NAACP v. City of Thomasville School District and Hoots v. Pennsylvania. In addition to his many litigation duties, Mark works on drafting and editing appellate court amicus briefs such as the Lawyers’ Committee’s briefs in support of the University of Michigan in Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger – two affirmative action cases heard by the U.S. Supreme Court. Mark has also worked to establish within the Lawyers’ Committee’s Education Project a grassroots community lawyering and advocacy system and the Lawyers’ Committee’s Brown v. Board of Education Social Science and Civil Rights Advocacy Initiative to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of that landmark decision.

Mark has also tailored his Lindsay Fellowship Project to coincide with the Lawyers’ Committee’s own 40th Anniversary Quest For Equal Justice Symposium and, more specifically, a related paper, panel presentation, and strategy workshop, which he has coordinated.

Fifty years ago the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, professed this country’s commitment to racial equality in education as a vital import to the sanctity of our nation’s survival. Nevertheless, the quality of education provided to our impoverished and minority youth has seen little improvement and, in many respects, has worsened. Not only is there increased racial segregation in our schools, but too many of the schools that serve economically disadvantaged minority students continue to suffer from inequitable funding and offer an inadequate education. Thus, Mark’s Fellowship Project was designed to explore ways of developing and implementing an advocacy and litigation model that will connect notions of equal protection, which are the basis of traditional school desegregation efforts, with recent educational adequacy principals – the latter of which are based on state laws and constitutions and have resulted in the recent passage of educational accountability laws and standards-based regulations. The Fellowship Project is premised on the belief that state law equal protection principles can be engaged in such a way as to assure that all students, regardless of race or wealth, receive what is now their pre-defined adequate education on an equal basis.

Mark has a personal commitment to this project, and educational civil rights in general. Indeed, an appreciation for the importance of a quality education was instilled in Mark at an early age. When he was thirteen years old, difficult economic times caused his parents to lose their jobs and prevented them from securing new employment. Ultimately, he and his family were evicted from their home. However, his parents made the difficult decision to stay in his hometown and to forego any move in search of work until after Mark graduated from high school. His parents, particularly his mother, recognized the quality of the school district in which he was enrolled and steadfastly refused to interrupt his education.

It wasn’t until later that Mark came to learn the true origin of that choice – the vast disparities that exist in this country’s system of public education and the fact that many students are forced to labor under discrimination rooted in factors such as race, gender, economics, and physical or mental disabilities. Mark hopes to dedicate his career toward eliminating the systemic manifestations of these and similar prejudices in educational programs.