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Juan Cartagena
General CounselJuan Cartagena has served as General Counsel at the Community Service Society since November 1991. His overall responsibilities include directing the legal department in public interest litigation on behalf of the poor in the areas of voting rights, education, housing, health and environmental issues; legal affairs of the corporation; and mass imprisonment and reentry initiatives.
Currently, he is working on imprisonment & reentry initiatives, including research on effects of mass incarceration on Latino communities; felon disfranchisement; racial impacts of criminal justice policies; alternatives to incarceration; access to employment for the formerly incarcerated; telephone justice campaign; imprisonment and redistricting; the New York Reentry Roundtable; research and advocacy on the nexus between poverty and incarceration; discriminatory law enforcement measures; training and public education on employment barriers for the formerly incarcerated; promotion of fair employment practices for the formerly incarcerated; juvenile justice; and mentoring individuals with criminal records.
“Working at CSS ensures that my professional career maintains its relevancy to social justice and justifies my ability to return on the investments made in me by the legions of Black and Latino civil rights and human rights leaders in this country.”
Juan Cartagena has written extensively on a number of legal issues, including voting rights, Latino participation in politics and elections, felon disenfranchisement, redistricting, and the court system and criminal justice.
His publications include articles for the University of Southern California Review of Law & Social Justice, CENTRO Journal, the International Review of Contemporary Law, Latino Studies, Guild Notes (National Lawyers’ Guild), the Rutgers Race and the Law Review, and chapters to books on civil rights litigation and language rights. He has also written op-eds for El Diario – La Prensa, New York Newsday, and the Daily News.
Juan Cartagena is a member of the New Jersey Governor’s Blue Ribbon Advisory Panel on Immigrant Policy and Chair of the New York Office of Children & Family Services, Internal Review Board. He has received other appointments to commissions and task forces by the New Jersey Supreme Court, the Governor of New York, and the New Jersey Attorney General.
Among his many honors and awards are the Jane Marks Murphy Prize, Columbia Law School, 1981; the Freedom Fighter Award from the Jersey City NAACP in 1986; the Don Pedro Albizu Campos Award from the Jersey City Borinquen Lions Club in 1995; the Martin Luther King, Jr. Social Justice Award from Dartmouth College in 2003; the Felix Fishman Award from the New York Lawyers for the Public Interest in 2006; and the Legal Services Award from the New York City Bar Association in 2008.
Prior to joining CSS, he was the legal director in the New York Office of the Department of Puerto Rican Community Affairs in the U.S., Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and an attorney at the Puerto Rican Legal Defense & Education Fund. He also served as a municipal court judge in Hoboken, New Jersey.
From 1992 to the present, Mr. Cartagena has been a part-time lecturer at Rutgers University, Department of Puerto Rican & Hispanic Caribbean Studies. He teaches the course "Law and the Latino Community in the U.S."
Mr. Cartagena received his J.D. from Columbia University School of Law and his B.A. from Dartmouth College.