John C. Brittain was teaching at the University of Connecticut School of Law when he helped bring a case against the state over segregation in Hartford's public schools. Some legislators objected to a state university professor suing Connecticut. Brittain recalled that his dean, Hugh Macgill, defended the litigation as part of his public-service responsibilities. The lawsuit, Sheff v. O'Neill, became a project that continued well beyond his years at the school.
Brittain grew up in Norwalk, Connecticut, and earned both his undergraduate and law degrees at Howard University. At Howard Law, he worked as a research assistant to Herbert O. Reid, a professor and civil-rights lawyer. Reid encouraged him to combine teaching with civil-rights litigation. Brittain completed law school in 1969 and began practicing in Mississippi, first with North Mississippi Rural Legal Services and later with the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. His work included school-desegregation cases and representing students arrested after protests at the University of Mississippi.
After several years in private practice in San Francisco, Brittain joined UConn Law in 1977. He stayed for twenty-two years. Teaching gave him an academic base while he worked with other lawyers on civil-rights cases. In the Sheff litigation, filed in 1989, the legal team challenged racial isolation in Hartford schools. The plaintiffs lost in the trial court in 1995. The Connecticut Supreme Court reversed that decision in 1996, beginning a long period of negotiations and proposed remedies.
Brittain left UConn in 1999 to become dean of the Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University. His deanship lasted until 2002, and he remained on the faculty until 2005. He then became chief counsel and senior deputy director of the Lawyers' Committee. In 2009, he joined the University of the District of Columbia's David A. Clarke School of Law, where he later served as acting dean from 2018 to 2019.
His education litigation extended beyond public schools. He was cocounsel for private plaintiffs challenging Maryland's treatment of its four historically Black universities. That case reached a settlement in 2021. In 2023, the Lawyers' Committee honored him at its sixtieth-anniversary celebration; the following year, the D.C. Bar selected him for its Thurgood Marshall Award.
When UConn interviewed Brittain in 2022, the Sheff case had reached another settlement after thirty-three years. He credited the original lawyers who stayed with the case and those who joined later. He also described the question still ahead: whether the remedies would improve achievement for children of color as well as reduce racial isolation.
