After years spent at the highest levels of public interest law in New Jersey, the Lowenstein Center for Public Interest's new director, Alexander Shalom, says that what ties all his work together is the drive to stand up for clients facing long odds with little other support.

"I like underdogs," Shalom said in an interview with Law360 Pulse. "I like being able to represent people who aren't well loved, aren't powerful, but instead are despised and are powerless, and to stand next to and give voice to those folks."

The former director of Supreme Court advocacy at the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey, Shalom has done work that has touched on some of the most high-profile issues facing the Garden State. Recently, he represented James Comer in a landmark case in which the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that it is unconstitutional to sentence juveniles to prison terms that are the practical equivalent of life without parole.

Shalom also advocated for New Jersey's public health emergency credit program, which led to the early release of thousands of people from prison during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Now, along with Natalie Kraner, a Lowenstein Sandler LLP partner and recently promoted legal director of the center, Shalom is tasked with his biggest role yet: steering the pro bono wing of one of the Garden State's premier law firms, and filling the shoes of public interest legend Catherine Weiss, who guided the center for 12 years.

The move comes at a time when both nationally and locally the kinds of causes the public interest attorneys advocate for, from reproductive rights to criminal justice reform, are facing increasingly stiff pushback. But for Shalom, those challenges are just an opportunity to step up with better legal work.

"I think we're well positioned at the center to adapt to a changing landscape that is sometimes hostile to the sorts of cases we want to bring, but to be adaptable in ways that ultimately serve the interests of our clients really well," Shalom said.

Shalom talked about his plans for the center and offered his thoughts and reflections on a career spent in public interest work in a recent interview with Law360 Pulse.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How do you feel about the move from your longtime home at ACLU?

I was at the ACLU for a long time. I was there for 13 and a half years and I was a public defender for five years before that, so I've been in the New Jersey public interest law space for a long time. I haven't been at a law firm in a really long time, since I was a law student, so it's a big change, but the truth is, we've been working with the center in so many different capacities at the ACLU that it felt really like a comfortable move.

What plans do you have for the center as you move into the top position?

There have been roles that the center has historically played that we would like to continue to play. So, for example, the center has always been this unique hybrid of doing direct services work and impact litigation, and has bridged the gap between those two communities in the legal sphere that otherwise wouldn't have been bridged.

Particularly that's true in the tenants' rights space and in the immigration space, and we will continue to operate in those spheres and both do direct services and impact litigation.

The center has also had a really long run, and a successful run, in representing the interests of the LGBTQ community, and we plan to continue to do that.

For example, the center just won this huge case out of the Northern District of Florida about access to gender-affirming healthcare that a Florida statute and rules had prevented. They prevented kids and, frankly, adults from receiving lifesaving gender-affirming care.

A couple of our lawyers went down and with co-counsel tried a case in Florida, which is not a jurisdiction where we have offices, but it was the national need to get down and defend the rights of children and adults to access lifesaving healthcare. So that's an area where we've had a lot of success, and we plan to continue to stay.

We also do a lot of nonlitigation public interest work: representing nonprofits in corporate transactions and things like that. That's an area I'm so excited to dig into because I think we've had at the center a huge impact on those sorts of matters, but it is candidly not an area where I have a lot of expertise. So I'm going to count on my colleagues at the firm to help me learn that, because I think that is a really important part of our practice going forward.

What work at the ACLU are you proudest of?

I joined a really different organization than the one that I left. When I joined I was the fourth lawyer in the office and I was supposed to be both handling our immigration work and our criminal legal work, and our education work and our democracy work. And if you look at the ACLU now, there are dedicated lawyers doing democracy work, there are dedicated lawyers doing immigration work, and I think the ACLU has built a reputation in the criminal legal space as being a key participant in lots of the cutting-edge litigation and policy work that gets done in that. So I'm proud that the ACLU has filled that space.

There's some particular things that I'm especially proud of. My representation of James Comer over the course of more than a decade certainly is at the top. I identified in the early 2010s that there had been this U.S. Supreme Court decision that indicated that kids needed to be treated differently in sentencing than adults, and sought out to make that happen in New Jersey state court jurisprudence.

I identified James as a potential client and wound up with the Gibbons law firm bringing a motion on his behalf. It took two trips to the New Jersey Supreme Court, but we pretty fundamentally changed the way that young people are sentenced and made it so that kids are no longer routinely condemned to die in prison for crimes that they committed as children.

I'm also proud of the work that we did during COVID to respond to what we all knew was going to be a crisis in our carceral settings for people who were facing real health risks. Whether it was the orders to show cause that we filed with the New Jersey Supreme Court that led to the release of hundreds of people, or the public health emergency credits that led to the release of thousands of people, these were pretty groundbreaking pieces of litigation and legislation, but they were also necessary for the moment.

From the Dobbs decision nationally, to the pushback within New Jersey to projects like bail reform that you worked on, is the environment for public interest work like what the center does becoming more difficult? How can you adapt to that?

As doors close, others open. This is something I've been thinking about at the ACLU for a long time, as federal courts were becoming increasingly hostile to the sorts of civil rights claims we were bringing.

That's obviously disappointing and it makes the job harder, but it also forced us to think about bringing litigation in state courts to try and vindicate some of those rights, and I think that's one of the things to think about — will the challenges that we face doom us, or instead, will they force us to become more creative lawyers?

We haven't shied away from those sorts of difficult fights in the past, and we won't start now.

--Editing by Robert Rudinger.

Correction: A previous version of this story misquoted Shalom. The error has been corrected. 

All Access is a series of discussions with leaders in the access to justice field. Questions and answers have been edited for length and clarity.

Have a story idea for Access to Justice? Reach us at accesstojustice@law360.com.