John Nethercut

John Nethercut joined the Public Justice Center as the Executive Director in 2002.

He serves on Maryland’s Access to Justice Commission and the board of the Francis D. Murnaghan, Jr. Appellate Advocacy Fellowship. John is a 2005 graduate of the Leadership, Baltimore City’s regional leadership training program, and a 2008 Weinberg Fellow, an executive director training institute. He received an award from the Weinberg Fellowship in 2010 for outstanding leadership in nonprofit management.

John’s career in social justice advocacy began in 1975 in Los Angeles, where he was a boycott organizer for Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers. John received a B.A. with honors in Anthropology/Sociology in 1978 from Earlham College in Indiana. His anthropology field study was with a Zapotecan village in Oaxaca, Mexico. After college he worked in a farmworker legal services program in Indiana.

While at Harvard Law School in Boston, from which he received a J.D. in 1982, John worked as a tenant union organizer and student lawyer with City Life/Vida Urbana. After law school, John worked in civil legal aid offices in Cincinnati and upstate New York. He was then appointed as an Assistant Attorney General and eventually Deputy Chief of the Consumer Protection Division of the Office of the Attorney General of Maryland, where he served for 14 years until coming to the Public Justice Center.