Dick Bauer is an Access to Justice Fellow at the National Consumer Law Center and Greater Boston Legal Services, and a Clinical Instructor and Supervising Attorney at the Tenant Advocacy Project of Harvard Law School. Dick is also Of Counsel to a number of Legal Aid Programs, including the Volunteer Lawyers Project, South Coastal Counties Legal Services, the Justice Center of Southeast Massachusetts, and Lawyers Clearinghouse, and is a Consultant to the Medical Legal Partnership of Boston, DOVE (DOmestic Violence Ended), Inc., and the Justice Resource Institute. In recent years, he has also been a Consultant to the Ohio Access to Justice Foundation and Northeast Legal Aid.
Most of Dick’s time is spent supervising and mentoring on appeals and housing cases, as well as giving trainings on litigation and appellate practice. Dick has also recently won a number of important appellate victories concerning Massachusetts foreclosure and housing law, including Pinti v. Emigrant Mortg. Co., Inc., 472 Mass. 226 (2015); Bank of America, N.A. v. Rosa, 466 Mass. 613 (2013); New Bedford Housing Authority v K.R., 97 Mass. App. Ct. 509 (2020); Nannan v Nevins, 95 Mass. App. Ct. 1107 (2019); and Everbank v Chacon, 92 Mass. App. Ct. 1101 (2017). In addition, he has represented amici in cases such as Bank of New York Mellon v. King, 485 Mass. 37 (2020); Ryan v. Mary Ann Morse Healthcare Corp., 483 Mass. 612 (2019); Boston Housing Authority v. Y.A., 482 Mass. 240 (2019); Rental Property Management Services v. Hatcher, 479 Mass. 542 (2018); Morse v. Ortiz-Vazquez, 99 Mass. App. Ct. 474 (2021); Care One Management, LLC v. Brown, 98 Mass. App. Ct. 589 (2020); U.S. Bank Trust v. Johnson, 96 Mass. App. Ct. 291 (2019), and Diamond Street Worcester Realty Trust v. Farrar, 95 Mass. App. Ct. 1118 (2019).
A graduate of MIT and Northeastern Law School, Dick has been in Legal Services since 1982. For 30 years, he served as a Staff Attorney and Senior Attorney at Greater Boston Legal Services. From 2014 to 2016 he was the Project Supervisor for the National Consumer Law Center’s HomeCorps Legal Services Program. In 2008-2009, he was the Senior Equal Justice Fellow at the Center for Legal Aid Education (now the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law) and has been a long-time faculty member of the Shriver Center’s Affirmative Litigation Training, most recently in Columbus (2019), Chicago (2018), Pittsburgh (2016), Ann Arbor (2014), New York (2012), and Boston (2011).
Dick served as a member of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Standing Advisory Committee on the Rules of Civil Procedure from 1998 until 2015. In 2021, he will receive a Lawyer Award from the Massachusetts Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, and in 2018, he was given the Massachusetts Bar Association’s Access to Justice Lifetime Achievement Award.
In his other life, Dick is a Member of the Somerville Historic Preservation Commission, a Commissioner of the Middlesex Canal, and Treasurer of the Cambridge Society for Early Music. Dick is active on the Board of the New England Jewish Labor Committee and the Steering Committee of Jobs with Justice, and is the vegvayzer for the Brookline Yiddish Vinkl. He and his wife Roberta live in Somerville and frequently lead historic bicycle tours.