Lives in the Law with Brett Kaufman, ACLU Center for Democracy
“What Tomorrow’s Public Interest Lawyers Can Learn from Civil Rights Litigation After 9/11”
Brett will discuss his experience as a U.T. Law student and young lawyer fighting to protect civil rights in face of the government’s response to the 9/11 attacks through cases involving habeas corpus, detention at Guantánamo, and foreign intelligence surveillance. He will also highlight his time working for human rights organizations abroad, and explain how his career evolved to include a broader portfolio that included landmark cases on domestic location tracking. Finally, Brett will try to put the current challenges of public interest law in perspective by looking back through these experiences to draw lessons for the next generation of public interest lawyers.
After the talk, Mr. Kaufman will be available to meet informally with students over lunch from 12:45 to 1:45 pm in the Goodwin Conference Room (CCJ 1.312).
RSVP here!
Hosted by the William Wayne Justice Center for Public Interest Law, the Justice Center Student Advisory Board, and the Career Services Office.
About the speaker:
Brett Max Kaufman is a senior staff attorney in the ACLU’s Center for Democracy working on a variety of issues related to national security, technology, surveillance, privacy, and First Amendment rights. He has litigated cases including ACLU v. Clapper, a challenge to the NSA’s mass call-tracking program, Doe v. Mattis, a habeas challenge to the government’s military detention of a U.S. citizen in Iraq, and Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle v. Baltimore Police Department, a challenge to Baltimore’s mass aerial surveillance program. He joined the ACLU as a legal fellow from 2012 to 2014, then spent one year as a teaching fellow in the Technology Law & Policy Clinic at New York University School of Law, where he continued to serve as an adjunct professor of law from 2015 to 2022. He returned to the ACLU as a staff attorney in 2015. He is also an adjunct lecturer in law at UCLA School of Law.
Brett is a graduate of Stanford University and the University of Texas School of Law, where he was book review editor of the Texas Law Review and a human rights scholar at the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice. After law school, he spent a year in Israel, serving as a foreign law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Asher Dan Grunis and as a volunteer attorney at Gisha Legal Center for Freedom of Movement. He then clerked for the Hon. Robert D. Sack of the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and for Judge Richard J. Holwell and (after Judge Holwell’s resignation) Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
About the Lives in the Law speaker series:
The “Lives in the Law” speaker series focuses on the work and lives of lawyers who strive to improve the lives of others through litigation, advocacy and public service.