John P. Relman

On the morning of April 1, 1993, twenty-one Secret Service officers stopped at a Denny's in Annapolis, Maryland, while preparing for a presidential visit to the Naval Academy. Fourteen were white and seven were Black. Six of the Black officers sat together at one table; the others, including the seventh Black officer, sat elsewhere and were served. The six at that table — in uniform, guarding the President of the United States for a living — waited fifty-five minutes. Their food never came. They stood up and left.

John Relman, then a young lawyer at the Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights, took their case. What began as one table's humiliation became a national reckoning: sworn accounts of Black customers made to prepay, ejected, segregated, and denied advertised specials at Denny's restaurants across the country. Relman served as lead counsel in the resulting class action, and the 1994 resolution — more than $17 million for his clients within a $46 million nationwide settlement — combined monetary damages with sweeping preventive measures against racial discrimination in public accommodations. One of his clients, agent Joseph James, named the point precisely: the money was not what mattered; the sanctions were.

The case fixed the pattern of Relman's career: take the indignity everyone can see, and litigate it until the organization behind it has to change.

Where the Water Line Stopped

Coal Run, Ohio, sits just outside Zanesville. For half a century, public water lines reached the surrounding white communities and stopped at the edge of the predominantly Black neighborhood — roughly twenty-five homes whose residents relied on wells fouled by mining, on hauled and delivered water, on rain and snow. Children grew up bathing in water their parents did not trust.

In Kennedy v. City of Zanesville, Relman and his partners Reed Colfax and Jennifer Klar represented sixty-eight residents and two organizations against the city, the county, and the water authority. The proof was almost cartographic: line placement against neighborhood demographics, decades of requests against decades of refusals, and the chain of public decisions that kept one community dry. Before trial, the court attributed the water authority's conduct to the county and granted the residents partial judgment. Public water had finally reached Coal Run in 2004; the trial decided what the deprivation had cost.

In July 2008 a jury answered: a verdict approaching $11 million for sixty-seven individual plaintiffs and the Fair Housing Advocates Association. It remains one of the defining civil-rights verdicts of its era — a jury putting a price on a water line that stopped where the Black families began.

Inventing the Law of Reverse Redlining

Redlining starved Black neighborhoods of credit. Its successor did something crueler: it flooded them with credit designed to fail. In Hargraves v. Capital City Mortgage, Relman represented borrowers and a fair-housing organization against a lender alleged to have concentrated predatory home-equity products in Washington's Black neighborhoods — exorbitant interest, equity stripping, loans structured toward foreclosure against homes rich in equity.

The 2000 summary-judgment ruling Relman won articulated a framework that had not existed before: plaintiffs could proceed by showing predatory terms plus racial targeting, without first producing a similarly situated white borrower who got a better deal. The decision gave the practice a name the law could act on — reverse redlining — and it became the doctrinal foundation for the fair-lending litigation of the subprime era, including the pioneering municipal suits Relman later brought for the cities of Baltimore and Memphis against major banks. The case itself resolved by settlement; the framework never stopped working.

Six Weeks to a Verdict, Years to Defend It

Saint-Jean v. Emigrant Mortgage tested whether that body of law could survive everything a well-funded defendant could throw at it. Eight Black New York homeowners challenged Emigrant's STAR NINA program — no-income, no-asset loans extended to borrowers with weak credit and substantial home equity, the equity being the point.

Relman tried the case with Glenn Schlactus and Tara Ramchandani. After six weeks of trial in 2016, the jury found race discrimination. The defense then contested the judgment through every available channel, and Relman's team met it at every stage: the 2022 damages judgment awarding $722,044 in compensatory damages to four homeowners and nominal damages to four others; the Second Circuit's February 2025 affirmance upholding equitable tolling, the jury instructions, and the ruling that a release did not extinguish the borrowers' claims; and the final conclusion of review in January 2026 that left the homeowners' judgment intact. Nearly fifteen years after filing, the homeowners' judgment was final.

Ordinances, Permits, and Screens

After Hurricane Katrina scattered New Orleans' population, St. Bernard Parish adopted a rental restriction limiting tenancies to blood relatives of homeowners — in a parish whose homeowners were overwhelmingly white — with a council statement announcing an intent to "maintain the demographics." Relman and Reed Colfax sued. A 2008 consent order enjoined the discrimination and retained the district court's jurisdiction for three years; when the parish pivoted to a moratorium on multifamily development, the court found discriminatory intent, ordered rescission, and ultimately held the parish in contempt. The 2014 resolution paid $1,843,728, and the deeper judgment endured: a government cannot zone its way around the Fair Housing Act.

In Fortune Society v. Sandcastle Towers, Relman led the challenge — with Glenn Schlactus and Jia Cobb, now a federal judge — to a 917-unit Queens complex's automatic exclusion of applicants with criminal convictions. The court preserved the Fair Housing Act disparate-impact claim for trial, and the $1,187,500 settlement helped establish criminal-record screening as fair-housing territory, a frontier the field is still mapping along lines his case drew.

Teacher of the Field He Helped Build

Relman spent ten years directing the Fair Housing Project at the Washington Lawyers' Committee before founding his own firm in 1999 — now Relman Colfax, where the partners' names on the door belong to lawyers he trained in these very cases. A 1986 graduate of the University of Michigan Law School, he wrote the Housing Discrimination Practice Manual that a generation of fair-housing lawyers keeps within reach, and he has taught public interest law at Georgetown and civil-rights litigation at American University's Washington College of Law. He has served on the boards of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the Legal Aid Society of the District of Columbia, and the Lawyers' Committees whose ranks he came from.

Water lines, loan terms, ordinances, tenant screens: the instruments change, and Relman keeps proving they are the same case — and keeps winning it.