Mary Philbrook Awards

27th Annual Mary Philbrook Public Interest Award

Presented to:
Kevin D. Walsh, Esq. ‘99
Associate Director, Fair Share Housing Center

and in remembrance of
Karen Detamore, Esq. ’82
Former Executive Director of Friends of Farmworkers

Proceeds from the Mary Philbrook Award Celebration support public interest lawyering at Rutgers School of Law – Camden, including the Association for Public Interest Law Student Summer Grants, the Domestic Violence Program and our Clinical Programs. 

KEVIN D. WALSH, ESQ., is the associate director of the Fair Share Housing Center, New Jersey’s foremost advocacy group for affordable, integrated housing. Since joining the center in 2000,Mr. Walsh has worked tirelessly in the courts, the legislature, and the executive branch to develop and enforce new mandates to local governments to encourage affordable housing, and to defend these gains against legislative and executive cutbacks. As a result, the number of homes in the suburbs planned and developed for lower income families has increased significantly. Through successful litigation to protect the Mount Laurel doctrine and fair housing enforcement structures, Mr. Walsh and his colleagues also helped extend coverage of open public records laws, increase availability of attorneys’ fees in public interest cases, and establish favorable law concerning constitutional and statutory limits on gubernatorial authority. As counsel to New Jerseyans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, Mr. Walsh sued to block lethal injections, leading to a moratorium on executions in New Jersey, and in 2007, helped secure legislative repeal of the state’s death penalty. Mr. Walsh, a 1999 graduate of Rutgers-Camden Law, also received one of the first Mary Philbrook Student PublicInterest Awards. Following graduation, Mr. Walsh clerked for the Honorable Gary S. Stein of the New Jersey Supreme Court.

KAREN DETAMORE, ESQ. , who passed away on May 1, 2012,fought for the civil and legal rights of the down trodden and under represented her entire life, first as a legal worker and then as an attorney. From 1989 through mid-2009, Ms. Detamore was executive director of Friends of Farmworkers, a statewide Pennsylvania legal services organization providing legal representation and education to migrant and seasonal farmworkers. FOF has protected thousands of farm workers, defending them on issues related to their employment and their ability to organize. A 1982 Rutgers–Camden Law graduate, Ms. Detamore was honored for her work in public interest law by the Pennsylvania Bar Association,the Pennsylvania Legal Aid Network, and the Peggy Browning Fund.