Partners

Laura Beshara is a partner in the firm. She represents plaintiffs in civil rights litigation involving fair housing, environmental justice, neighborhood equalization, and municipal services discrimination cases. She is one of the most experienced federal court trial and appellate lawyers in cases involving housing and neighborhood discrimination in the country. Her experience includes complex federal litigation, class action lawsuits with multi-year remedial implementation, monitoring, and enforcement efforts. Ms. Beshara has sought and obtained innovative and effective remedies for racial segregation and other forms of discrimination by local, state, and federal government defendants.

Ms. Beshara has spent decades litigating the actions of various public and private defendants who have furthered the inequities of racial segregation in neighborhoods. Along with Mr. Daniel, Ms. Beshara represented three Black neighborhoods in Dallas in a class action lawsuit that remediated the largest illegal landfill in the state of Texas. As part of the remedy in this case, Judge Barefoot Sanders ordered that the site be converted into the location for the Trinity River Audubon Center, a wildlife preserve, education center, and environmental resource in Dallas. Other complex cases by the firm have sought to address unequal conditions in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods. In two separate cases, Ms. Beshara and Mr. Daniel obtained relief for homeowner residents of Cadillac Heights in Dallas, a de jure segregated neighborhood that the City of Dallas had deliberately excluded from flood protection and ringed with lead smelters, a wastewater treatment plant, chemical industries, and rendering plants.

She also specializes in civil rights cases that seek the end to housing and zoning practices that exclude Black and Hispanic residents from predominantly White areas. She and Mr. Daniel have represented Black public housing tenants in long standing public housing desegregation cases that have opened up thousands of housing opportunities for tenants outside of racially concentrated areas. She has litigated cases on behalf of tenants and organizations where suburbs seek to block affordable housing.

She has extensive experience representing advocacy organizations and non-profits. She and Mr. Daniel have represented the Inclusive Communities Project in litigation to remove barriers for low-income housing tenants to obtain housing in opportunity areas. She and Mr. Daniel won the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project U.S. Supreme Court case holding that the Fair Housing Act imposed liability for discriminatory impacts and effects without regard to the presence of intentional discrimination. The case challenged the racial segregation of the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit housing in Dallas She and Mr. Daniel litigated the case through trial, argued the appeal to the Fifth Circuit, and briefed and argued the case at the U.S. Supreme Court.

In another notable case for ICP, they changed the way HUD sets the subsidies for rents in the voucher program that led to the unique remedy of a new rent subsidy setting method for vouchers based on housing rents by zip codes. The remedy eliminated the method that confined voucher families to low income, high poverty areas with low rents without raising the cost of housing for those families.

Ms. Beshara and Mr. Daniel have been practicing law together in private practice since 1991.

J.D. Southern Methodist University Law School, 1991

B.A. Southern Methodist University, 1988

Southwestern Law Journal, editor 1990-1991

U.S. Supreme Court

U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia

U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit

U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas

U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas

U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas

U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas

U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia

Michael M. Daniel began his legal career in 1974 at the Dallas Legal Service Foundation in Dallas, Texas. While there he focused on tenants’ rights cases including: the Texas Supreme Court case implying a landlord duty to repair rented homes, Kamarath v. Bennett, 568 S.W.2d 658 (Tex. 1978); the case making evictions in retaliation for reporting housing code violations illegal, Sims v. Century Kiest Apts., 567 S.W.2d 526 (Tex. Civ. App. - Dallas 1978); and the case overturning unfair limitations on tenants’ rights to appeal from an eviction order, Compton v. Naylor, 393 F.Supp. 575 (N.D. Tex. 1975). He represented many tenants in eviction cases using jury trials to obtain just verdicts in justice of the peace courts. Various tenant groups, civil rights groups, and low-income community organizing groups retained his services.

Mr. Daniel represented several Black citizens seeking to enforce Dallas City Charter provisions providing for civilian review for charges of police misconduct. Graves v. City of Dallas, 532 S.W.2d 106 (Tex. Civ. App. - Dallas 1975) and Bell v. Craig, 555 S.W.2d 210 (Tex. Civ. App. - Dallas 1977) (suits requiring City to implement civilian review of police misconduct). The City had implemented these provisions for White citizens but refused to do so for Black citizens.

Since entering private practice in 1980 Mr. Daniel has focused his civil rights practice representing groups and individuals seeking remedies for the effects of racial segregation on their opportunities for fair housing opportunities, equal municipal services for neighborhoods, and non-discriminatory election procedures for choosing city council members, school board members, and county commissioners.

He contracted with East Texas Legal Services to represent their clients in civil rights cases involving public housing desegregation, voting rights, municipal services discrimination. One of the voting rights cases was won at the U.S. Supreme Court. City of Port Arthur v. U.S., 459 U.S. 159, 160 (1982). There were several counties in East Texas where Mr. Daniel represented plaintiffs in voting rights litigation who were successful in obtaining increased African American political power by redrawing county commissioner precinct lines, obtaining city council single member districts to replace at-large voting schemes, and obtaining single member districts for independent school district plans.

While in East Texas, several public housing desegregation cases started during this period resulted in remedies that addressed both the segregation and the resulting unequal conditions imposed on Black tenants. Clients Council v. Pierce, 711 F.2d 1406 (8th Cir. 1983). Along with Ms. Beshara, they later brought about remedies for racial segregation in the Young v. Pierce East Texas public housing class action in 70 public housing authorities located in 36 East Texas counties. Young v. Pierce, 628 F. Supp. 1037, 1040, 1048 (E.D. Tex. 1985).

Mr. Daniel brought two important cases in Dallas in the mid-1980s with long reaching effects in voting rights and public housing desegregation. Mr. Daniel represented the African American plaintiffs Roy Williams and Marvin Crenshaw in the 14-1 single member district case against the City of Dallas. Williams v. City of Dallas, 734 F.Supp. 1317 (N.D. Tex. 1990). This case resulted in the current 14 single member district City of Dallas City Council. Only the mayor is elected at large.

Mr. Daniel represented the African American plaintiffs in the class action that ended the historical and ongoing deliberate and overt racial segregation by the Dallas Housing Authority. The case was filed in 1985, and Ms. Beshara joined the representation of the class in 1991. The Housing Authority, HUD, and the City of Dallas strenuously contested the case through settlement, liability, and remedial efforts. There were17 appeals filed by these defendants during the course of the case.

Litigation brought by Mr. Daniel resulted in funding being provided for various non-profit and advocacy organizations. The funding was to assist low-income tenant families with the services and assistance needed to obtain decent, safe, and sanitary housing in neighborhoods with conditions that were compatible with and not inimical to family life.

Ms. Beshara and Daniel represented the Inclusive Communities Project, Inc. and argued on the winning side in the precedent setting U.S. Supreme Court case Texas Dept. of Hous. and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project, Inc., 576 U.S. 519 (2015). The Supreme Court held that violations of the Fair Housing Act can be established without proof that the policy causing the discriminatory effects was intended to be racially discriminatory.

J.D. Southern Methodist University Law School

B.A. University of Dallas

United States Army, 1965-1968.

U.S. Supreme Court

U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia

U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit

U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas

U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas

U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas

U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas

U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia