Gibbons Fellowship

Working with a broad cross-section of public interest groups and community leaders, the Fellowship has become widely known in New Jersey and nationally for providing expert legal assistance to marginalized, underrepresented people and causes. The Fellowship’s venerable history has included impact litigation on the most significant public interest issues of our time, including, but not limited to, the mistreatment of alleged “enemy combatants” during the “war on terror” after 9/11 (Rasul v. Bush; ACLU v. Department of Defense; Salim v. Mitchell); LGBTQ+ rights (Garden State Equality v. Dow); police accountability and other racial justice issues (Saadeh v. N.J. State Bar Association; Bulur v. N.J. Attorney General; Fraternal Order of Police v. City of Newark); opposition to the death penalty (New Jersey v. DiFrisco; Alabama v. Whitehead) and other draconian punishments, particularly lengthy sentences imposed on children (New Jersey v. Comer; United States v. Grant); the rights of students to an adequate and desegregated education (Abbott v. Burke; In re Red Bank Charter School; In re TEAM Academy; M.A. v. Newark Public Schools); the rights of pregnant women (Doe v. Middlesex County; New Jersey v. Y.W.; New Jersey v. A.L.); the rights of people convicted of crimes to be free from unconstitutional prison conditions or unjust collateral consequences (Rouse v. Plantier; Alves v. Main; Doe v. Poritz; E.B. v. Verniero); the rights of immigrants and noncitizens (Gayle v. Warden Monmouth County; Texas v. United States); and the application of the First Amendment in various contexts (Hassan v. City of New York; North Jersey Media Group v. Ashcroft). Among other awards, both Judge Gibbons and longtime Fellowship Director Lawrence Lustberg (who was the first Gibbons Fellow) have been recognized as Lawyer of the Year by the New Jersey Law Journal as a result of their work on Gibbons Fellowship matters.

The Gibbons Fellowship continues to achieve successful results in federal and state cases, including the following:

• Recently, an amicus brief that the Fellowship authored on behalf of expert biomechanical engineers was cited by the New Jersey Supreme Court when it ruled that discredited junk science about “Shaken Baby Syndrome” is inadmissible in criminal prosecutions.
• The Gibbons Fellowship recently won a habeas petition based on ineffective assistance of counsel for resentencing of a man who was sentenced as a teenager to a de facto life-without-parole prison term.
• The Fellowship continues to advocate for the rights of immigrants and noncitizens, filing briefs in support of students engaging in constitutionally protected speech and migrant farmworkers seeking equal wage and overtime protections, and winning an injunction protecting international students who were impacted by the Department of Homeland Security’s unlawful termination of their student records.
• The Fellowship continues to defend the rights of LGBTQ+ individuals, including by filing an amicus brief in a federal appellate court regarding the rights of particularly vulnerable incarcerated transgender women to be housed in women’s prisons.
• The Fellowship is litigating the right of incarcerated people to be housed in safe conditions, in an appeal on behalf of prisoners who were infected with COVID-19 at FCI Fort Dix at the early stages of the pandemic, with severe consequences to their health.
• The Fellowship continues to advocate for the rights of people convicted of sex offenses, in an appeal on behalf of a person indefinitely committed to New Jersey’s Special Treatment Unit without adequate treatment or a path to release.
• The Fellowship argues for the rights of New Jerseyans to adequate and affordable housing, representing tenants in a class action regarding illegal displacements from their homes and filing a brief in support of the state’s landmark amendments to its affordable housing law.
• We continue to fight, as we have for many years, for the rights of New Jersey public school students to attend desegregated schools, where we are now asking the appellate courts to rule that the state must remedy what the trial court found to be a “marked and persistent racial imbalance in numerous school districts across the State that [New Jersey’s] actions, policies, programs, and inaction have failed to remedy.”

In October 2025, Larry Lustberg took emeritus status, and Michael Noveck—a former Gibbons Fellow—took over as the new Executive Director of the Fellowship.  The Fellowship welcomes requests for representation or advice from all sources, including public interest organizations, legal services or public defender offices, government agencies, private nonprofit organizations, law school clinics, courts, and individuals. Inquiries regarding potential representation by the Gibbons Fellowship can be directed to mnoveck@gibbonslaw.com or llustberg@gibbonslaw.com.

The firm generally hires one Gibbons Fellow per year for a two-year term, during which the Fellow works exclusively on the Fellowship’s impact litigation docket under supervision of the Fellowship Director. Previous fellows have gone on to hold high-level positions at public interest organizations, government, and academia. More information on how to apply for the Gibbons Fellowship is below.