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Non-Profit To Make Law Accessible To Public Launched In Cliffside Park

CLIFFSIDE PARK, N.J. – Attorney Mariam Morshedi is on a mission to help non-lawyers better understand the law – and it all started when she launched her non-profit out of her Cliffside Park home.

Mariam Morshedi launched a non-profit out of her Cliffside Park home.

Mariam Morshedi launched a non-profit out of her Cliffside Park home.

Photo Credit: Mariam Morshedi

Morshedi, a Boston University Law School graduate, was living in Cliffside Park in 2015, when she created Subscript. With a tagline of “Law, Simply Put,” the organization has a goal of synthesizing legal information and delivering it to the public in a concise way.

“You don’t need to spend $150,000 and three years of your life to learn the basics about the law. You need to be motivated and you need to want to spend a little time and thought on it, and that’s why I am providing materials that make it painless for people to get one step deeper,” said Morshedi, a Texas native who now lives in Montclair.

Subscript’s website features blog posts and info-graphics on current events and the laws circling them. For example, there are posts on the travel ban, sanctuary cities and the Affordable Care Act. The organization strives to deliver information in a straight-forward, non-partisan way, Morshedi said.

“In this time of political drama, everyone seems to want to be advocating for something or other,” Morshedi said. “And if they are mobilizing, they might want some better background to the stuff they want to talk about.”

Eventually, Morshedi would like to feature a database of federal laws on the website. She said most of the databases that lawyers use are behind paywalls, and she wants the public to have access to reliable legal information.

“Otherwise people are just stuck using Google, and getting some information that is decent, some information that isn’t. But how are they to know what’s the good stuff?” she said.

Morshedi said the people she represented in one of her first cases out of law school inspired her to create the project.

“We had 40 individual clients that were being pushed out of their homes for the town wanting to redevelop the community,” she said of her clients in Mount Holly. The case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, and a settlement was reached just week before oral arguments.

Morshedi said she spent a lot of time with the clients in the case, and “they were always so smart and understanding the issues that affected them, but they were so intimidated by the law, that I thought, ‘Why are there not better resources out there for people who really want to learn?’”

To learn more about Subscript, CLICK HERE.

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