Greetings from Access to Justice Outreach Attorney Tabitha Woodruff!
In July of 2023, Public Justice welcomed Tabitha Woodruff to the team as the organization’s first-ever outreach attorney for the Access to Justice Project! Learn more about Tabitha and her background in her open letter below.
Hello!
My name is Tabitha Woodruff, and I am the new Outreach Attorney for the Access to Justice project. I am honored to join the Public Justice community and humbled by the incredible work you all have accomplished together.
An excerpt from Tabitha’s 1999 journal
On September 29, 1999, I wrote in my journal, “I think I know what I’m going to do when I grow up…I want to help fight against injustice…a lawyer.” I was a twelve-year-old in rural Ohio who had never met a lawyer in real life. I had only seen them in comic books, and becoming a lawyer seemed the closest I could get to becoming Wonder Woman. When I started my first nonprofit job in law school as the Anti-Human Trafficking Specialist for my local Salvation Army, I quickly learned that no one defeats injustice alone with a cape. You need a league of zealous advocates with different strengths focused on a unified vision of a just world. Having different perspectives and opinions only makes our coalition stronger and our interventions better calculated.
Through building up my local anti-human trafficking coalition, I met the attorneys who later hired me and taught me to practice disability rights law and to represent survivors of domestic violence in family court. After a decade of practicing law for the public interest at the state and local level, I am so excited to become part of the work Public Justice leads nationally.
You all have built an incredible network of litigators and civil rights leaders over the past half century, and I am here to strengthen and expand that network. By lifting up the challenging work done by our Access to Justice team at the core of Public Justice’s mission, I hope to grow our network and recruit new allies to better prepare us for the challenges ahead.
Please reach out to me to say hello, to share your ideas, and to recommend where you would like to see me build new connections and relationships for Public Justice. You can reach me by e-mail at twoodruff@publicjustice.net.
To learn more about my background, check out my LinkedIn or my Instagram. I look forward to getting to know you!
In solidarity,
Tabitha
