University of Alabama School of Law

The University of Alabama School of Law served as the first institutional base for a nonprofit law center that Bryan Stevenson and Eva Ansley opened in February 1989 to provide free legal services to people facing execution in Alabama. Its withdrawal of support and promised office space during the center’s first months became one of several early setbacks that pushed the founders to regroup in Montgomery, Alabama.

Initial Setting

The law center opened in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, with its office at the University of Alabama School of Law. The project’s purpose was to provide free, quality legal representation to condemned men and women on death row in Alabama. The school’s premises therefore gave the fledgling operation an initial place to work, although the evidence does not describe a continuing institutional partnership or the law school’s role in the center’s legal work.

Withdrawal of Support

Within the first few months, the law school withdrew both its support and its promise of office space. The withdrawal came as the new organization was already struggling: its first director resigned, and recruiting lawyers to undertake full-time death-penalty work in Alabama for less than $25,000 a year proved difficult. The law school’s decision was one element in a cluster of practical and financial obstacles, rather than the sole cause of the center’s instability.

Relocation and Consequences

After disheartening meetings with the board and the loss of the anticipated institutional base, Stevenson and Ansley regrouped and decided to start again in Montgomery, the state capital. They found a small building near downtown and signed a lease in the summer of 1989. The project, reorganized around this new base, would eventually be named the Equal Justice Initiative. The move marks the end of the law school’s documented role in the organization’s founding story.

Significance in the Founding Narrative

The episode presents the school as an early host whose withdrawal exposed how precarious the center’s beginnings were. The founders also faced denied state funding needed to obtain federal matching dollars and a shortage of lawyers willing to take on the work at the available salary. In that context, losing the promised office space mattered as part of a broader institutional retreat: the initiative could not depend on its initial setting and had to secure its own premises and raise money independently.