The Right to Fair Housing: Cases, Statutes, and Context, First Edition

Florence Wagman Roisman began practice at the Federal Trade Commission in 1963. In 1964, she joined the U.S. Department of Justice in the appellate section of the Civil Division. In 1967, she became staff attorney, and later managing attorney, for the D.C. Neighborhood Legal Services Program (NLSP), initiating a 30-year association with the federally financed program of civil legal assistance to poor people. While at NLSP, she was co-counsel in several of the landlord-tenant cases that now appear in many property casebooks. Subsequent to her tenure with NLSP, she worked with the legal services program both in private practice and through the National Housing Law Project.

In 1989, she was the first recipient of the Kutak-Dodds Prize, awarded by the ABA's Standing Committee on Legal Aid and Indigent Defendants and the National Legal Aid and Defender Association. In 1994 she was the first recipient of the Georgetown University Law Center Equal Justice Foundation Award for Outstanding Faculty Commitment to Public Interest Law. In 2000, she received the Thurgood Marshall Award given by the District of Columbia Bar. Prof. Roisman received the inaugural Equal Justice Works Outstanding Law School Faculty Award in 2004 "for her dogged pursuit of equal justice and her pivotal role in nurturing a public interest ethic among law students." In 2010, the District of Columbia Legal Aid Society gave her its Servant of Justice Award "for faithful dedication and remarkable achievement in assuring that all persons have equal and meaningful access to justice." In 2011, she received from the National Law Income Housing Coalition the Cushing Niles Dolbeare Lifetime Service Award. In 2014, the Society of American Law Teachers gave her its M. Shanara Gilbert Human Rights Award; in 2015, she received the David B. Bryson Award from the National Housing Law Project and Housing Justice Network and the Elizabeth Hurlock Beckman Award for an educator who serves the community. In 2017, the DC Neighbohood Legal Services Program gave her its Pioneer of Justice Award.

She has taught full-time at Georgetown University Law Center and the law schools of the University of Maryland, Catholic University, and Widener University; she has taught part-time at the George Washington University National Law Center and the Antioch School of Law. In 2006 she was the J. Skelly Wright Fellow at Yale Law School. She has received several Trustees' Teaching Awards from Indiana University and has served on the boards of the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana, the national ACLU, and the Inclusive Communities Project of Dallas, TX as well as the Society of American Law Teachers, the District of Columbia Bar, the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless, and the Poverty and Race Research Action Council, of which she was a co-founder. The substantive focus of her practice, teaching, and writing has been on low-income housing, homelessness, and housing discrimination and segregation.