When Scott Medlock began working as a staff lawyer for the Austin-based Texas Civil Rights Project (TCRP) in 2005, the same year he graduated from the University of Texas School of Law, a grant the nonprofit had received to pursue prisoners’ rights covered his salary. But Medlock remembers TCRP Director Jim Harrington warning him that funders would never renew.
“This will be good for a year,” Medlock recalls Harrington saying. Harrington, who characterizes Medlock’s “journey,” as “amazing,” says he told Medlock when they secured that initial grant, “This is an awful area of the law because I can’t believe we are going to make a lot of progress.”
