About Maria
Lawyer
"Throughout her career, Maria Foscarinis has challenged the exclusion of homeless people from the freedoms and protections that apply to everyone,...[and] championed the fight to make access to basic needs, including housing, universal."
Michele Wakin,
Homelessness in America: A Reference handbook
Image of Maria and former US Attorney General Eric Holder at a National Homelessness Law Center event.
When best-selling author John Grisham wrote The Street Lawyer, he drew material for his fictional legal thriller from the cases and experiences of Maria Foscarinis.
Like the protagonist of Grisham’s novel, Maria left a high-powered Wall Street law firm to become a legal advocate for homeless people, eventually moving to Washington D.C. in 1985 to open an office for the National Coalition for the Homeless—and to mount a campaign for a federal response to the crisis which was just beginning to explode across the country.
Maria’s entry into advocacy began in 1983. Thousands of families had been priced out of the housing market and become homeless in Nassau County, a New York City suburb, and she volunteered to represent them pro bono in a class action lawsuit. After seeing first-hand the impact that legal advocacy could make in people’s lives, she left her law firm to help organize a campaign for a federal response to the growing national crisis.
The daughter of Greek immigrants, Maria grew up hearing stories of the terrible deprivation and suffering her family experienced during World War II, as well as their courageous resistance. Resolving to address the injustice of extreme poverty in the world’s richest country, she dedicated her career to fighting homelessness in America, and she threw herself into lobbying Congress and suing the Reagan administration for policy changes.
Maria worked with a small cadre of “strange bedfellows,” including controversial homeless advocate Mitch Snyder and Republican lobbyist Rod DeArment, and in 1987 the first and still only major federal legislation addressing homelessness—now known as the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act—became law.
That landmark victory, however, was meant only as a first, emergency step—to be followed by long-term solutions. In 1989, Maria founded the National Homeless Law Center (previously known as the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty) to carry the work forward. The Law Center has won landmark legal and policy victories, including establishing education rights for homeless children, converting vacant properties to housing, and combatting the criminalization of homelessness, while also laying a foundation for the recognition of housing as a human right in the United States.
Throughout her decades of advocacy, Maria has worked directly with unhoused people, whose experiences and voices have informed and driven her work in Congress, the courts, and the media. While The Street Lawyer is a work of fiction, the gross injustice of homelessness in America is all too real.
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Author
Maria's book, And Housing for All: The Fight to End Homelessness in America, tells the true story of that injustice and its impact on people’s lives and argues that to end homelessness the United States must recognize housing as a basic human right. The book will be published June 3, 2025 by Prometheus Books. Maria is represented by Andy Ross, of the Andy Ross Literary Agency.
Because of her internationally recognized leadership and expertise, Maria has often been called upon for Congressional testimony and media commentary. Regularly quoted in media outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, Bloomberg, CNN, BBC, CCTV, and Al-Jazeera, among many others, she also contributed opinion pieces to influential publications including USA Today, the Christian Science Monitor, the Huffington Post, and The Hill.
Maria had published dozens of book chapters, scholarly articles and opinion pieces on legal issues affecting homeless people, including topics ranging from strategy, ethics, the human right to housing, and the criminalization of homelessness and poverty. Her speaking engagements include law schools, colleges and universities, law firms, bar associations, religious groups, think tanks, funder convenings, and grass roots demonstrations and conferences.
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Awards
Recognition for Maria’s legal advocacy includes being named a Human Rights Hero by the American Bar Association, receiving the 2016 Katharine and George Alexander Law Prize from Santa Clara University School of Law, the John Macy Award from the National Alliance to End Homelessness, the 2006 Public Interest Law Award from the Public Interest Foundation at Columbia Law School, and a 2021 Rockefeller Foundation Practitioner Residency in Bellagio, Italy.
Teaching
Maria is a graduate of Columbia Law School, where she was Notes and Comments editor of the Law Review. She holds a Master of Arts degree in Philosophy from Columbia University, where she was awarded a John Dewey Fellowship. She received her A.B., magna cum laude and with honors in Philosophy, from Barnard College, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.
Maria began her legal career as a litigator at Sullivan & Cromwell, after serving as a law clerk for the Honorable Amalya L. Kearse on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
Since 2018, she has held an adjunct appointment as Lecturer in Law at Columbia Law School, where she teaches a seminar on homelessness law and policy.
Personal
Maria lives in Washington, DC, with her husband, Nathan Stoltzfus, and their cat, Mauvaki. In 2022, she celebrated 35 years of cancer survivorship.