Profile

Gowri Krishna is an experienced clinical educator with a strong focus on economic, racial, and social justice. She began her career as an Equal Justice Works Fellow at the Urban Justice Center, where she led a project that provided legal services to low-wage immigrant worker groups.

After her fellowship, Professor Krishna taught community economic development clinics at Fordham School of Law, the University of Michigan Law School, and Roger Williams University School of Law.

In 2015, she returned to the Urban Justice Center to lead the expansion of its Community Development Project, which represents worker cooperatives and nonprofit groups throughout New York City on a broad range of corporate matters, including structuring, governance, tax, and employment issues.

Throughout her career, Professor Krishna has maintained a steady focus on confronting the country’s widening wealth gap and addressing threats to immigrants’ rights, workers’ rights, and public services. She has promoted innovative approaches to community-building that draw on the strengths of traditionally underrepresented and under-serviced groups, and she has advocated for workers’ rights to dignified jobs free of abuse and exploitation.

She is an expert on immigrant-owned worker cooperatives and has presented on her work at the American Association of Law Schools Annual Meeting and the American Bar Association (ABA) Forum on Affordable Housing and Community Development Law Annual Meeting. Professor Krishna also chaired the Community Economic Development Committee of the ABA’s Business Law Section and regularly organizes meetings of New York City community economic development attorneys.

In addition, she has published scholarship on worker cooperatives and movement lawyering.

Through the Nonprofit and Small Business Clinic, Professor Krishna leads New York Law School students in counseling New York City nonprofit and community-based organizations, worker cooperatives, social ventures, and neighborhood-based entrepreneurs that could not otherwise afford legal services on matters such as corporate formation, governance, tax and real estate issues, and contracts.

Professor Krishna is also on the Board of Directors of the Clinical Legal Education Association (CLEA), and she serves as Co-Chair of the CLEA New Clinicians Conference Committee.