News Center: Faculty Spotlight

Genevieve Fajardo

These are hard times. Across the country people are feeling the crunch of a downturned economy. Fraudulent loans, mortgage schemes and identity theft have caused more people to lose their homes and join the ranks of the homeless and impoverished. Genevieve Hébert Fajardo doesn’t think the story has to end that way.

A clinical professor of law at the St. Mary’s School of Law’s Center for Legal and Social Justice, Fajardo focuses most of her time on consumer fraud cases, supervising student attorneys on real cases where clients have lost a home or a vehicle through fraud, foreclosure schemes, or other deceptive practices. Her dedication to increasing access to legal services not only ignites a passion in her students, but also rescues clients from dire situations.

“Our clients have been manipulated to believe they were promised something that never materialized or worse, tricked out of something they already had,” said Fajardo, an expert on poverty–related issues.

Although they get plenty of cases in Bexar County, the Civil Justice Clinic also travels to the severely underserved Texas–Mexico border region throughout the year, taking on several new cases each trip. St. Mary’s clinicians and their student lawyers address the otherwise unmet legal needs of low–income people in San Antonio and South Texas.

Fajardo has been committed to understanding the plight of the homeless throughout her career. She began as a clerk and litigator in New York City before teaching in the Housing Rights Clinic at Hofstra Law School. She then moved to Boston where she ran a legal aid organization dedicated to helping veterans and the homeless.

In San Antonio, Fajardo serves as a board member of the South Alamo Regional Alliance for the Homeless, an umbrella organization that strives to regulate other local organizations that provide grants, programming and distribute HUD funds in the area.