Our Litigators of the Week are Roman Silberfeld and Tommy Du of Robins Kaplan and Mark Rosenbaum of public interest law firm Public Counsel, who represent a class of thousands of homeless veterans with traumatic brain injuries and serious mental illness in Los Angeles County. After a month-long bench trial in L.A. federal court earlier this year, U.S. District Judge David Carter found that the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs illegally leased portions of its West Los Angeles campus to private interests and discriminated against disabled veterans by failing to provide housing that would allow them to meaningfully access their healthcare benefits. “The VA must remediate its mishandling of this resource so that the land may once again be available for its intended purpose: the housing of veterans,” Carter wrote.

The judge issued an injunction requiring the VA to build more than 2,500 units of housing for low-income veterans on the property. The ruling comes after the VA previously agreed to a master plan to develop housing as part of a litigation settlement nearly a decade ago, but failed to meet the prior settlement’s housing goals.