Jean Camper Cahn (May 26, 1935 – January 2, 1991) was an American lawyer and social activist who helped establish federal financing of legal services to the poor.

The Camper household was a regular meeting place for local NAACP figures and national civil rights leaders, such as Thurgood Marshall and her godfather Paul Robeson.

In 1950, Jean gained entrance into the prestigious Emma Willard School for Girls in New York on the recommendation of theologian Howard Thurman.

When she recovered, she resumed her studies at Swarthmore College where she tracked down the recipient of her love letters: Her future husband, Edgar S. Cahn.

Cahn earned her LLB in 1961, and the next year she and her husband were hired on a Ford Foundation grant to help run antipoverty programs in New Haven, Connecticut.

The experience proved pivotal for Cahn herself as well as for the development of legal aid for the poor and for the course of President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society antipoverty programs.

The piece impressed a number of figures in the Lyndon Johnson administration, especially Sargent Shriver, head of the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO).

In 1963 the couple moved to Washington, D.C., where Jean Cahn had taken a position at the African Desk at the State Department[2] and her husband went to work for Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.

The program not only provided legal services to people who would not have had access to the nation's courts but also created critical employment opportunities for minority lawyers.

Shriver too soon soured on Jean, preferring to place in her position a white male attorney who he felt would be better equipped to pitch the program to establishment lawyers.

In 1966 Jean Cahn helped found the federally funded Center for Community Action Education (CCAE), directed by former Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) national director James Farmer.

Also in 1967, Cahn joined the legal team that defended Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr. against corruption charges before a congressional committee.

It filed hundreds of lawsuits to halt bus fare increases, compel local television stations to hire African Americans, challenge slum lords, and make the District of Columbia's government more responsive.

The ULI's high visibility caused consternation in the new Richard Nixon administration and at George Washington University, which became increasingly uneasy over Cahn's troublemaking clinical law program.

When Donald Rumsfeld (who had opposed the creation of the OEO as a congressman) took over direction of the program under President Nixon, Cahn's ULI was doomed.

After nearly three years, the university decided that ULI's provocative work should go, prompting Cahn to declare, "Well, I'll just start my own damn law school" (Waldman).