Brett Kaufman is a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union's Center for Democracy in New York, where he works primarily on national security issues. He spent a year as a teaching fellow and staff attorney at NYU Law School's Technology Law & Policy Clinic, where he continues to serve as an adjunct professor. Before that, he served as a legal fellow with the ACLU's National Security Project.
Before joining the ACLU, he clerked for Judge Robert D. Sack of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, Judge Richard J. Holwell of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, and (after Judge Holwell's resignation from the bench) Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, also of the S.D.N.Y. After graduating from Texas Law and prior to beginning his federal clerkships, he spent one year in Israel, first clerking for Justice Asher Grunis of the Israeli Supreme Court and then working with Gisha, an NGO dedicated to protecting Gazans' human right to freedom of movement.
At Texas Law, Brett participated in American Constitution Society, the Supreme Court Clinic, the National Security Clinic, Texas Law Review, and the Rapoport Center for Human Rights. He spent his law-school summers working at the Inter-American Court for Human Rights in San Jose, Costa Rica, and the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta. Originally from Chicago, Brett taught English in Madrid, Spain, and worked in California’s Bay Area as a paralegal at a non-profit disability-rights law firm before coming to Austin.
