Someone You Should Know

Shriver Center senior attorney Margaret Stapleton received the Thomas H. Morsch Public Service Award  at the Chicago Bar Association and Chicago Bar Foundation’s July 2009 Annual Pro Bono and Public Service Awards Luncheon. 

The award called Margaret’s 37 year legal career “a nearly ideal mix of dedicated representation of individuals and highly effective systematic advocacy aimed at root causes and innovative solutions to poverty.”

After graduating from the University of Chicago Law School in 1971, Margaret spent the first decades of her career in southern Illinois.   She started in Cairo, Illinois, as a staff attorney for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, representing clients in civil rights and anti-poverty struggles.  Later, Margaret spent ten years in East St. Louis, Illinois, as the lead public benefits and health law specialist at the Land of Lincoln Legal Assistance Foundation.   In 1986, she came to Chicago to work at the Legal Assistance Foundation of Chicago and, in 1996, moved to the Shriver Center.  At both LAF and the Shriver Center she has worked on preserving, expanding, and improving public benefits programs, ensuring comprehensive and affordable health care for all,  lowering post-prison barriers faced by people with criminal convictions, and making family law and procedures, including child support,  more attuned to the needs of low income parents and their children.   In all of her work she has been a voice for the “unpopular poor”—minority men, especially non-custodial fathers, people with criminal records, and those struggling with illness or addictions.