A Northwestern Law School clinic is providing free legal defense to a group of anti-Israel radicals who organized a blockade of Chicago's O'Hare International Airport that shut down travel last spring. One of the organizers is benefiting from that defense after repeatedly accusing Northwestern of "anti-Palestinian discrimination."
Sheila Bedi, a Northwestern law professor who leads the school's Community Justice and Civil Rights Clinic, is representing four of the blockade organizers, according to legal filings reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. Her clinic and others like it at Northwestern use funding from the law school and its donors to offer legal services pro bono, according to attorneys familiar with the school.
The Washington, D.C.-based Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute filed a class action suit against the "anti-American" organizers in September, arguing that they should pay civil damages to travelers who missed their flights and were forced to walk miles with their luggage to access the airport.
One of the organizers, Palestine Legal "Justice Fellow" Rifqa Falaneh, has a history of sparring with Northwestern. She's filed a string of civil rights complaints against the university on behalf of students who she says "have been the target of anti-Palestinian discrimination." In a press release issued just two days after the Chicago airport blockade, for example, Falaneh said Northwestern law "refuses to care about its Palestinian students" and called on "federal civil rights officials to ensure their rights are protected." Now, one of the law school's professors is defending her for free.
The revelation reflects the surge in anti-Israel activism seen within top U.S. law schools in the wake of Hamas's Oct. 7 terror attack. At Yale Law School, for example, a Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter led a campaign to bar a soldier in the Israel Defense Forces from visiting campus, saying the soldier's presence would make "many of us—especially Palestinian Arab, Muslim, Black, and brown students—feel physically and psychologically unsafe and unwelcome in our own school."
SJP's national chapter helped organize the April 15 blockade in Chicago alongside Jewish Voice for Peace and a local left-wing organization, the Chicago Dissenters. The groups acted in alignment with a "multi-city economic blockade … in solidarity with Palestine" organized across the country under the banner "A15 Action."
The Chicago blockade was meant to protest Boeing, which sells equipment to Israel. It lasted for more than an hour and saw participants link arms across the I-190 access road that services O'Hare during peak travel times.
Falaneh served as a top organizer, and the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute's suit names her as a defendant as a result. A former SJP organizer at the Chicago-based DePaul University, Falaneh was a regular fixture at the illegal encampment at Northwestern last spring.
Bedi, for her part, leads Northwestern's Community Justice and Civil Rights Clinic, one of 32 organizations housed within the Bluhm Legal Clinic, the law school's clinical program. Ninety percent of Northwestern law students work for a clinic like Bedi's during their time at the school to "gain direct experience representing clients," according to the Northwestern Law School website. The clinics represent those clients for free, according to attorneys familiar with the school's offerings.
Bedi's clinic aims to provide law students "with the opportunities to work within social-justice movements on legal and policy strategies aimed at redressing over-policing and mass imprisonment." Through it, Bedi represents "grassroots community groups seeking to end mass imprisonment and to redress abusive policing." She also praised the Northwestern encampment, calling it "beautiful" and posting photos from it with her son.
Bedi has not hid her affiliation with Northwestern in her work representing Falaneh and other anti-Israel radicals. Northwestern is listed underneath her signature on court documents in the case, as is her official university email address.
Ted Frank, the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute's litigation director, slammed Northwestern over Bedi's involvement defending the radicals.
"These are free legal services, or at least unpriced legal services," Frank told the Free Beacon. "They're paid for by the Northwestern budget, which in turn comes from tuition dollars, it comes from taxpayers, it comes from donations."
"There's an irony that these free lawyers, in a world where there's so much legal need, devote scarce resources to defending people who want to destroy the very system of Western abundance in favor of barbarians."
A Northwestern representative told the Free Beacon that Bedi's legal work does not "necessarily reflect the views of the university or its law school."
Falaneh has repeatedly celebrated Hamas's Oct. 7 terror attack, calling for "many more October 7ths until full Liberation."
"Our people in Palestine and in the diaspora are celebrating. This has never been seen before," she posted to X on the day of the attack. One day later, she argued that there are no Israeli "civilians."
"Who are Israeli 'civilians'?" she wrote. "They are people who willingly choose to live in an occupied land as settlers."
Bedi and Falaneh did not respond to requests for comment.
In addition to Falaneh, Bedi is representing three other protesters named in the class action suit: Jinan Chehade, Superior Murphy, and Simone Tucker. Chehade is a founding member of Chicago's SJP chapter and participated in the Northwestern encampment. A Georgetown Law center graduate, she was set to work at the firm Foley & Lardner, which pulled her job offer over her anti-Israel advocacy.