Michael Pruitt ’24 Awarded Powell Fellowship in Legal Services

Third-year student Michael Pruitt, a longtime housing advocate and newly elected county official, has been awarded the University of Virginia School of Law’s 23rd Powell Fellowship in Legal Services to work with Housing Opportunities Made Equal Inc. in Richmond, Virginia.

The Powell Fellowship, named for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr., awards $55,000 and additional benefits to graduates who will be providing legal services to low-income clients through a host public interest organization. The Law School award is made for one year with the expectation that it will be renewed for a second year. Powell Fellows are also eligible for the school’s Loan Forgiveness Program.

Pruitt will work with HOME to provide legal support to public benefits recipients who have been discriminated against in the housing application process — a practice he has previously lobbied against.

“HOME is doing exactly what I want to do — exactly what I’m excited about,” he said.

Although Pruitt once faced his own adverse housing action, his path to advocacy wasn’t exactly linear. He grew up in a rural area of South Carolina and halfway through high school left home to study creative writing at the residential South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities.

However, during his time in the artist community, Pruitt became uneasy with the artist as an observer rather than a participant in social change.

“I realized I should do something that impacts people,” he said, rather than just write about others who make a difference.

He attended Duke University on a Navy ROTC scholarship, majoring in political science and falling a couple credits short of a minor in Arabic. His language skills came in handy when he was deployed to the Middle East, inquiring about a longer sewage hose for their ship and the occupation of someone held at the security perimeter in a foreign port who turned out to be the garbage man.

During his first deployment, a landlord sued him for breaking his lease when he was given his orders, and a default judgment was entered against him — all of which is illegal under the Servicemembers’ Civil Relief Act. The judgment, which he hadn’t known about, nearly derailed his ability to buy his first house. He cooperated with the Department of Justice’s investigation of the landlord, who ultimately settled with the DOJ in a case affecting 127 servicemembers. Pruitt later interned with the DOJ’s Housing Section during his 1L summer.

“To the best of anyone’s knowledge, this was the first time the Housing Section had ever had a former ‘aggrieved person’ — in the language of the DOJ, because we are not clients — come and work for them,” he said.

Pruitt racked up nearly eight years of naval service, working in communications, damage control and intelligence across eight countries. Briefly, he was called upon as one of the country’s leading experts on Iranian surface naval tactics when U.S. tensions with Iran heightened in 2019.

While still in the Navy, he pursued a master’s in policy management from Georgetown University, where fellow student — and then-chair of the Arlington Tenant-Landlord Commission — Kellen MacBeth drew him into his efforts to develop a local ordinance to stop Arlington landlords from discriminating against recipients of government benefits.

Pruitt and MacBeth spent two years working with the Georgetown Civil Rights Clinic, the Arlington NAACP, the local Human Rights Commission and other partners. When a similar bill banning housing discrimination based on the source of funds for rent passed the House of Delegates, Pruitt started calling and, when possible, meeting personally with every single member of the Virginia Senate — by whatever means necessary. That included catching Sen. Creigh Deeds on his way out of a restroom at an event.

The bill passed in 2020.

The experience contributed directly to his master’s thesis about affordable housing in Appalachia, but reflecting on the role of lawyers in the process, he realized that if he wanted to improve housing access, he would need some legal skills of his own.

Pruitt applied to “too many” schools, but felt that UVA Law was best positioned to help him meet his goals.

Although he chooses to live in the Scottsville District of Albemarle County, Pruitt has been actively involved on North Grounds. His pro bono work has included eviction prevention, employment, local government policy, public benefits and transgender rights. He has served as executive board member for the Lambda Law Alliance, treasurer for the Virginia Employment and Labor Law Association, and as a member of the editorial board for the Virginia Law Review.

He is a fellow in the Program in Law and Public Service and earned the Squire Patton Boggs Public Policy Fellowship for a summer role last year. He honed his legal skills through the State and Local Government Policy Clinic and Decarceration and Reentry Clinic.

He spent his 2L summer with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund with support from a grant from UVA Law.

Pruitt was sworn in as the Scottsville District representative to the Albemarle Board of Supervisors in December 2023 and began his term in January. One of the first things he voted on was a $2 million funding package to provide permanent housing for nearly 100 homeless people in the state and to continue redeveloping the Southwood mobile home community. One of his major goals in office is to establish a continually funded housing trust fund.

“It’s very fundamentally rewarding work,” he said. “Creating subsidies to support the building of new housing is perhaps the single most influential thing localities can do to increase access to affordable housing.”

During his fellowship with HOME, he will represent clients seeking to enforce the source of funds law he helped get passed in 2020. Some landlords try to get around the new law, such as by using an income ratio to filter out applicants who receive government benefits.

As Pruitt sees it, the work still functions like larger-scale impact litigation.

“These relatively small cases can have really dramatic policy implications and ripples,” he said. “Say a landlord who rents 400 rooms is made to change their policy — I’m helping 400 people through just one client.”

Powell Fellows

• Helen Song ’23
• Meredith Kilburn ’22
• Nooreen Reza ’21
• Kevin Jackson ’20
• Tex Pasley ’17
• Maya Iyyani ’18
• Shannon Ellis ’15
• Megan Lisa Watkins ’16
• Cat Martin ’15
• Mario Salas ’14
• Kim Rolla ’13
• Dan Hausman ’12
• Peggy Nicholson ’11
• Crystal Shin ’10 (Update)
• Phil Storey ’09
• Amy Woolard ’08
• Clermont Fraser ’07
• Tiffany Marshall ’06 (Update)
• Anishah Cumber ’05 (Update)
• Angela Ciolfi ’03 (after clerking a year) (Update)
• Lise Adams ’03
• Kit Ballenger ’02 (Update)