Advocating for Housing Justice: Inside Northwestern Pritzker Law’s Tenant Advocacy Clinic

Among the many opportunities students have for experiential learning at Northwestern Pritzker Law’s Bluhm Legal Clinic, the Tenant Advocacy Clinic stands out for the breadth of cases offered to its students. In running the clinic, Director Eric Sirota ensures that students have a chance both for “direct representation,” such as appearing in court on behalf of a client in an eviction case, and “community lawyering,” partnering with grassroots tenant associations to improve building conditions and building management. These tenant associations in turn represent hundreds of tenants between them. The Clinic also provides students a chance to engage in policy work, often advocating for enhanced housing access for people with criminal records in concert with coalition partners. “I really like teaching the combination of those things,” he says. “Both are very important in housing advocacy.” And both experiences help prepare clinic students for their future careers, no matter their career path. 

Sirota has now been with the Law School for four semesters, with 26 students having passed through the Tenant Advocacy Clinic during that time. For one of those students, Tyeese Braslavsky (JD ’26), the Tenant Advocacy Clinic was particularly well-suited to her career goals. When she first began her studies at Northwestern Pritzker Law, she quickly found a passion for housing legal aid.

“I believe that housing is a human right,” she said. “Being deprived of housing really turns into a life or death situation. People’s quality of life becomes orders of magnitude worse, and that’s putting it very mildly…I’m really gratified to use the legal knowledge I have to provide tenants with basic resources.”

After working in eviction defense at Legal Aid Chicago, Access Living, and the Law Center for Better Housing, the Tenant Advocacy Clinic was a natural next step.

In the two semesters at the clinic, Tyeese quickly learned that that no two days are the same. “The work changes case by case,” she said. “Even between the two eviction cases I handled this semester, the work for each was wildly different.”

Students in the clinic handle everything from client intake and information verification to representing clients in housing court, as well as working on briefs and discovery motions. “It’s a clinic where you get a lot of hands-on, immediate litigation experience,” said Sirota. “Eviction cases are fast. Which can be sort of panic-inducing because everything is moving so quickly, but it also lets a student see a case from beginning to end during the course of the semester.”

Such litigation experience is what initially drew Northwestern Pritzker Law alum Breana Spight (JD ’25) to the Bluhm Legal Clinic as a whole and the Tenant Advocacy Clinic specifically. “I always really liked litigation and knew I wanted to be a litigator,” she said. “I chose the Tenant Advocacy Clinic after I took a fair housing class.”

Like many 3L students coming into the clinic, Breana already had a position at a large law firm, Foley & Lardner LLP, and the fair housing class helped her decide that she wanted to pursue housing work as her pro bono practice. “I liked how we were able to connect with the tenants, see their lives and get to know more of how we as lawyers can be used as tools to help.”

Today, working as a commercial litigator, Breana has found that her experiences at the Tenant Advocacy Clinic can be applied to a great deal of her practice now. Citing a recent example, she recounts how she handled her first temporary restraining order (TRO) at Foley. “We actually worked on starting and doing [a TRO] when I was at the clinic. And so it was helpful because I already knew how to draft it…I felt very comfortable going into it despite it being my first time. And honestly, it kind of felt a little lower stakes because at the clinic, it was people who were in a much more dire circumstance.” The “group project” nature of clinic work also helped prepare Breana for her work as a first-year associate, where often three or four associates will be working together on a single large project.

The sorts of higher-stakes situations referenced by Breana are not uncommon at the Tenant Advocacy Clinic. Tyeese said the most challenging and most rewarding parts of her work in the clinic is “…the humanity of it all. Sometimes your clients…are in a really bad place, and it weighs on you. But then the rewarding aspect is the rapport you get to build with these people, and the trust…I can go home after doing clinic and say I helped somebody today.”

Breana echoed these sentiments: “the most rewarding part was being a person clients could come to for solutions. In litigations, [the case] is a fire now, and the client needs to speak about it…it felt really good to be someone who can listen and still take steps to make the fire more manageable, or have it go away entirely.”

Above all, both Tyeese and Breana emphasized that the experiential learning of the clinic gave them invaluable tools in their future career as lawyers, tools honed even further by the guidance and teaching of Sirota. “Eric is great,” said Breana. “He clearly walked us through everything and was very patient in showing us how this will help us in the future. He made us stop at every point to think about how this would help us be a better lawyer, asking questions like what surprised you? What was good? What will you take with you? And that really helped me come into practice remembering those things.”

Meanwhile, upon graduation Tyeese will return to Chicago Legal Aid as an Equal Justice Works fellow in their housing practice group. Her time at the clinic, she said, contained several of the many moments that “gave me so much confidence and inspiration. There’s so many fantastic clinics here, including the Tenant Advocacy Clinic, where you really get to feel yourself being a lawyer. It gives you the chance to say ‘okay, I learned civil procedure and contracts and property…how can I put that all together to really make a difference?’”