Speakers / Authors:
Steven M. Freeman
Steven M. Freeman became Director of Legal Affairs with the Anti-Defamation League in 1988, after serving as the Assistant Director since 1985. As Legal Director he oversees the agency’s work on bias crimes, discrimination, free speech, terrorism, and church-state issues. This work has included more than 250 amicus curiae briefs before the U.S. Supreme Court and federal courts.
In addition to being Director of Legal Affairs, Mr. Freeman also serves as the Associate Director of the Civil Rights Division of the Anti-Defamation League. His work in this area ranges from school security, as it relates to hate groups and cyber-bullying, to tracking extremist groups.
Mr. Freeman served as the Director of Special Projects of the Greater New York Conference on Soviet Jewry and as a staff attorney for the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights (now Human Rights First). His responsibilities at these organizations included coordinating the efforts of attorneys engaged in pro bono human rights activities, serving as a liaison to elected and appointed officials, and preparing legal documents for submission to various domestic and international forums.
He is a member of the State Bar of New York and the Bar of the United States Supreme Court.
Mr. Freeman earned a B.A. from Yale University in 1976 and received his J.D. from Stanford Law School in 1979.
Jamal Greene
Jamal Greene joined the faculty at Columbia Law School in 2008. He teaches constitutional law, constitutional theory, federal courts, and a legal theory workshop. Professor Greene’s research focuses on the sociology of legal and constitutional argument. He is the author of more than 20 law review articles and book chapters, with works appearing in the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, and the Columbia Law Review, among other publications.
Prior to joining the Columbia faculty, Professor Greene served as an Alexander Fellow at New York University School of Law. From 1999-2002 he was a reporter for Sports Illustrated.
Professor Greene has served as a law clerk to the Honorable Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and the Honorable John Paul Stevens of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Professor Greene is a 2005 graduate of Yale Law School and holds an A.B. degree in economics from Harvard College.
Troy A. McKenzie
Troy A. McKenzie is as an associate professor of law at the New York University School of Law. He teaches bankruptcy litigation, complex litigation, civil litigation and the federal courts.
Before joining the NYU faculty, Mr. McKenzie was a litigation associate for four years at Debevoise & Plimpton in New York.
Following law school, he served as a law clerk to Judge Pierre N. Leval of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and Justice John Paul Stevens of the Supreme Court of the United States.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering in 1997 from Princeton University and his law degree in 2000 from the New York University School of Law, where he was an Executive Editor of the Law Review and a member of the Order of the Coif.
Steven R. Shapiro
Steven R. Shapiro is the Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union. He directs a staff of approximately 90 full-time lawyers who maintain a large and active docket of civil liberties cases around the country. Those cases cover a broad range of issues, including: free speech, racial justice, religious freedom, due process, privacy, reproductive and women's rights, immigrant's rights, gay rights, voting rights, prisoner's rights, and the death penalty.
Mr. Shapiro joined the New York Civil Liberties Union in 1976. He has been the ACLU's Legal Director since 1993, after serving as Associate Legal Director from 1987–1993. During that time he appeared as counsel or co-counsel on more than 200 ACLU briefs submitted to the United States Supreme Court. He has successfully argued before the Supreme Court.
Mr. Shapiro is also an adjunct professor of constitutional law at Columbia Law School, and a frequent speaker and writer on civil liberties issues. He was a member of the Board of Directors of Human Rights First for 20 years and currently serves as a member of the Policy Committee of Human Rights Watch. He is on the Advisory Committees of the U.S. Program and Asia Program of Human Rights Watch.
After graduating magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1975 he spent one year as law clerk to Judge J. Edward Lumbard of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
Richard J. Sullivan
Honorable Richard J. Sullivan was appointed to the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York in July 2007 and entered duty on August 6, 2007. Prior to becoming a judge, he served as the General Counsel of Marsh Inc., a leading risk and insurance services firm.
Judge Sullivan is a member of the New York American Inn of Court and an adjunct professor at Fordham University School of Law, where he teaches courses on white collar crime and trial advocacy.
From 1994 to 2005, Judge Sullivan served as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York, where he was Chief of the International Narcotics Trafficking Unit and Director of the New York/New Jersey Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force. In 1998 he was named the Federal Law Enforcement Association’s Prosecutor of the Year. In 2003 he was awarded the Henry L. Stimson Medal from the Association of the Bar of the City of New York.
He is a 1990 graduate of Yale Law School and graduated with a B.A. in 1986 from the College of William & Mary. Following law school he was a law clerk to the Honorable David M. Ebel of the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, before becoming litigation associate at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz in New York.
Brian Wolfman
Brian Wolfman is a co-director of Georgetown University Law Center’s Institute for Public Representation, where he heads the Institute’s civil rights and general public interest clinic. He joined the Georgetown faculty in 2009 after spending nearly 20 years at the national public interest law firm Public Citizen Litigation Group, serving the last five years as the Litigation Group’s Director. He served as an advisor to the American Law Institute from 2004-2010.
Mr. Wolfman has handled a broad range of litigation, including cases involving health and safety regulation, class action governance, court access issues, federal preemption, consumer law, public benefits law, and government transparency. He has been lead and co-counsel in several dozen Supreme Court cases, argued five cases before that Court (winning four), and litigated many of other cases before federal and state appellate and trial courts around the country. He directed Public Citizen’s Supreme Court Assistance Project, which helps “underdog” public interest clients litigate before the U.S. Supreme Court.
In addition to his clinic responsibilities at Georgetown, he also teaches a litigation seminar and Federal Courts and the Federal System. He regularly teaches a course on appellate courts at Harvard Law School, and, before joining the Georgetown faculty full time, he taught as an adjunct there and at Stanford, Vanderbilt, and the American Law Institute.
Mr. Wolfman earned a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1978 and received his J.D. from Harvard Law in 1984.