Staff/Contact Us
Michael Diamond
Director, Harrison Institute for Housing and Community Development, diamondm@law.georgetown.edu
BA, Syracuse University
JD, Fordham University
LLM, New York University
Michael Diamond is Professor of Law at Georgetown Law where he is the Director of Georgetown's Harrison Institute for Housing and Community Development and directs its Housing and Community Development Clinic. He also teaches Corporations and Property. Professor Diamond taught at American University's Washington College of Law and at Antioch University School of Law and visited at several Law Schools. He has taught Contracts, Business Associations, Property, Administrative Law, and seminars in Housing, Economic Development and Sociology of Law. Professor Diamond has been of counsel to the law firms of Goldfarb & Singer and O'Toole, Rothwell, Nassau, and Steinbach and a consultant to the ABA's Central and Eastern European Law Initiative on proposed housing laws in Russia and Bosnia, and to the Agency for International Development. He consulted with the District of Columbia Law Revision Commission and several advisory commissions on housing policy. His books include: Corporations: A Contemporary Approach, 2d Ed. Carolina Academic Press (2004), and How to Incorporate; A Guide for Entrepreneurs and Professionals, 5th Ed. John Wiley and Sons (2007). His recent articles include: Community Lawyering: Revisiting the Old Neighborhood, Columbia Human Rights Law Review (2000); Leaders, Followers and Free Riders: The Community Lawyer's Dilemma when Representing Non-Democratic Client Organizations, Fordham Urban Law Journal (2004, with O'Toole); Community Economic Development: A Reflection on Community, Power and the Law, The Journal of Small and Emerging Business Law (2004); Affordable Housing, Land Tenure and Urban Policy: The Matrix Revealed, Fordham Urban Law Journal (with Byrne). Professor Diamond gave the keynote address at a workshop entitled Affordable Housing and Public/Private Partnerships: The Intersection of Housing, Property, and Real Estate.at the University of Colorado Law School. He has recently presented papers at the University of Colorado Law School (on tenant participation in Low income Housing Tax Credit projects) and Chapman University Law School (on the cultural meaning of property).
Raquel C. Skinner
Staff Attorney, rcs75@law.georgetown.edu
BA, Spelman College
JD, University of Pennsylvania
Raquel C. Skinner is an adjunct professor and staff attorney with the Harrison Institute's Housing and Community Development Clinic at Georgetown University Law Center. As a staff attorney, she advises low-income tenant associations with respect to their purchase and renovation of multifamily housing and conversion of such housing into condominiums and cooperatives. In her adjunct role, she supervises work performed by clinical law students on these transactions and teaches in Georgetown Law's Housing and Community Development Seminar. Before joining the Harrison Institute, Ms. Skinner was an Associate General Counsel at Fannie Mae, where she provided transactional legal support to Fannie Mae's Multifamily Mortgage Business. Ms. Skinner's earlier experience includes several years with two major law firms where she represented borrowers and lenders in commercial real property transactions and worked on corporate and securities transactions.
Alina S. Ball
Clinical Fellow, asb99@law.georgetown.edu
BA, Wellesley College
JD, UCLA School of Law
Alina is a clinical teaching fellow with the Harrison Institute for Housing and Community Development. In this role, she represents low-income tenant associations in a variety of transactional matters that includes working with the tenants to organize, purchase residential buildings, develop and renovate their residential buildings and learn how to operate the buildings.
Prior to joining the Harrison Institute, Alina was a business associate in the Washington, D.C., office of Morrison & Foerster LLP, where her practice focused on representing investment advisors and other entities in secondary debt transactions. She also has experience advising nonprofit corporations on issues relating to entity formation, regulation of exempt organizations, and nonprofit governance.
Alina received her J.D. from UCLA School of Law in 2008, with a specialization in Critical Race Studies. She received her B.A. degrees from Wellesley College majoring in Mathematics and Spanish, with a concentration in Latin American Studies. Before pursuing her legal career, Alina was a program coordinator at Hispanics in Philanthropy, where she helped administer capacity building grants to Latino-led nonprofits across California.
John Mangin
Clinical Fellow, jmm451@law.georgetown.edu
BA, Yale University
JD, Yale School of Law
John Mangin is a fellow at the Harrison Institute for Housing and Community Development. He worked previously at Fair Share Housing, an affordable housing developer that grew out of the Mount Laurel exclusionary housing cases in the 70's and 80's, and at the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), an organization in Brooklyn that makes workshops, videos, books, and other teaching tools about how cities work. He was formerly a homebuilder and continues to take building and furniture-making jobs. He graduated from Yale Law School in 2008.
Michelle K. Foumbi
Business Manager, mkn29@law.georgetown.edu, 202-662-4232
BA, Pace University; Certificate in U.S. Law and Methodologies, New York University.
Michelle Foumbi is the business manager at the Harrison Institute for Public Law. She manages financial accounts, payroll, billing, and event planning, and she contributes to program development. Her past positions include marketing assistant at Hogan Lovells, volunteer leader at the White House, human resource assistant at Family Care International, and governance intern at the U.N. Development Program in Rwanda, paralegal for a NY law firm, and client representative for Sterling InfoSystems, Inc.
