When law professor Craig Futterman co-founded a civil rights law clinic at the University of Chicago Law School more than a decade ago, he knew he wanted it to focus on police accountability and be rooted in the community.

He found an outpost of sorts in the now-demolished Stateway Gardens public housing project in a first-floor office set up by journalist and human rights activist Jamie Kalven. For years, Futterman brought law students to Kalven's Stateway office to document cases of police misconduct.

This month, their years of hard work paid off with an Illinois appellate court ruling that the public has a right to see documents bearing on allegations of police misconduct. The process that led to this "watershed moment," as Futterman puts it, began more than a decade ago with the story of a Stateway resident named Diane Bond.

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