Albert Kauffman

ph: (210) 431-2297
akauffman@stmarytx.edu

Associate Professor of Law
B.S. 1971, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
J.D. 1974, University of Texas School of Law

Before St. Mary's School of Law

Since leaving the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) in 2002, Professor Kauffman served as Senior Legal Policy Advocate at the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Race, Ethnicity and Diversity and lecturer at the Boalt Hall Law School at the University of California at Berkeley and as a Senior Legal & Policy Advocate Associate for The Civil Rights Project and a lecturer at Harvard Law School. He has been a civil rights litigator for 28 years, specializing in the education, voting and employment rights of Latinos.

Highlights

As a MALDEF attorney, Kauffman was the lead attorney for plaintiffs in the Texas school finance cases, for Latino plaintiffs in the Texas Higher Education System finance and desegregation case and in litigation challenging Texas's use of the TAAS test for graduation from Texas high schools. He has also litigated affirmative action cases, local and state voting rights, employment discrimination cases, immigration and hospital admission policy cases.

Kauffman has been an advocate on civil rights issues, and was one of a small team of experts involved with passing Texas's 10% plan for admission to universities and Texas's recent changes to its admissions and scholarship criteria for public graduate and professional schools.

Selected in 2010 as one of the "The 25 Greatest Texas Lawyers of the Past Quarter-Century" by Texas Lawyer

Selected by Texas Lawyer as one of the ten most influential lawyers in Texas in the decade 1985-95.

Specialties:

• Federal procedure
• Texas procedure
• Education and civil rights

Publications:

• Tribute, Judge William Wayne Justice: A Life of Human Dignity and Refractory Mules, St. Mary's Law Journal, 215-230 (2010).
• Introduction to Issue: Education and Minorities in the Modern Era: Working Civil Rights Into Practice, Policy and Procedure, The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Minority Issues , 101-108 (2010).
• Texas School Finance Litigation: Great Progress and Some Regression, in Institute for Educational Equity and Opportunity, A Quality Education for Every Child: Stories from the Lawyers on the Front Lines, pp.109-155 (David Long, et al. ed., 2009).
• The Texas School Finance Litigation Saga: Great Progress, Then Near Death By A Thousand Cuts, 40 St. Mary's Law Journal 511-579 (2008).
• The Hopwood Case: What It Says and What It Doesn't, chapter in Affirmative Action's Testament of Hope: Strategies for a New Era in Higher Education by Mildred Garcia, State University of New York Press (1997).
• Accessibility to Comprehensive Higher Education in Texas, 31 The Social Science Journal 263 (1994) (with Richard Jones)
• Applying Edgewood v. Kirby to Analysis of Fundamental Rights Under the Texas Constitution, 22 St. Mary's Law Journal 69 (1991) (with Carmen Rumbaut)
• Minority Concerns: A Response to TASP, Chapter in From Politics to Policy: A Case Study in Educational Reform, Matthews, Swanson, Kerker, Praeger Press, (New York, NY 1991).
• No Child Left Behind Act Resource Guide, The Civil Rights Project at Harvard (2004) (with Dan Losen)
• Lead writer and lead researcher on large number of briefs to U.S. Supreme Court, Texas Supreme Court, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and numerous U.S. District Courts on issues of school finance, testing, higher education finance, affirmative action, and voting rights.