BY HUDSON SANGREE
PORTRAITS BY TOM KATES
From its counterculture roots in the late 1960s
to its emphasis on the public interest today, the Northeastern University
School of Law has attracted students who are independent, innovative, and
willing to take risks. Many of the school's graduates have gone on to pursue
groundbreaking legal work. What sets these lawyers apart is their willingness
to challenge the status quo, to put themselves on the line for their convictions,
and to move the law forward-a difficult task in a system based on tradition
and precedent.
Eight such Northeastern lawyers are profiled here.
They include Susan Crockin, who helps clients navigate the uncertain territory
where the law hasn't kept up with reproductive medicine; Neil Leifer, who
has turned his sights from suing Big Tobacco to challenging the manufacturers
of lead paint; Deena Hurwitz and Doug Ford, human rights lawyers helping
to bring justice and the rule of law to Bosnia; Patty Flannery, who fights
sex discrimination in professional and college sports; Reed Zars, a Wyoming
attorney who single-handedly takes on huge corporations polluting Western
air; and Mary Bonauto, a civil rights lawyer working to secure fundamental
freedoms for gays and lesbians.
Another is Barry Steinhardt, the ACLU's associate
director, who defends privacy and free expression on the Internet. Remembering
his own time at Northeastern, Steinhardt says the co-op program, unique
among law schools, appeals to students predisposed toward cutting-edge
legal work.
"Northeastern attracted students who were
iconoclastic, who were interested in new issues and new ways of using their
law degree," he says. "You were encouraged to think outside the
box. It was a nontraditional approach to legal education, and so there
was a larger percentage of students involved in on-the-edge issues than
at other law schools."
Professor Daniel Givelber, a former dean and one
of the school's founders, credits co-op with providing students who are
"self-reliant and interested in looking at the world through a different
lens" with the opportunity to "spread their wings."
"Co-op gives students a sense of the reality
of law as practiced in a range of different settings," he says. "This,
in turn, leads many of them to believe that they should and can succeed
in doing something both out of the ordinary and in the service of the broader
public."
Each of the lawyers profiled here has done just
that. They've changed the law or tried to move it forward in some respect.
Such change is vital to the American legal system,
says Givelber: "The law depends for its growth on lawyers who are
prepared to challenge the accepted ways of doing thing. The danger of a
precedent-driven system is that it will become set in stone. Lawyers who
undertake new approaches to old problems are essential to prevent that
from happening."
Hudson Sangree, a student at N.U. School of
Law, wrote on Social Security Commissioner Ken Apfel in the March issue.
Deena Hurwitz and Doug Ford
Combining forces for Human Rights in Bosnia
Just a few years out of law school and recently
married, Deena Hurwitz and Doug Ford have already worked in Southeast Asia,
North Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. But these excursions
abroad have been no honeymoon. The couple are practitioners in the uncertain
and sometimes risky field of human rights law. Their latest destination
was Bosnia, where for the past two years Ford investigated wartime atrocities
while Hurwitz trained lawyers in Western-style law and advocated for women's
rights.
Ford, L'96, served in Tuzla as deputy director
of Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), an organization that applies forensic
science to expose human rights abuses. In Bosnia, the group used DNA testing
to identify the remains of massacre victims unearthed from mass graves.
"Our goal in Bosnia was to achieve a measure
of justice by holding those who ordered the killings accountable,"
says Ford. "We also tried to provide some dignity to the dead, and
to bring truth and closure to their families."
PHR's greatest challenge, he says, was to identify
the victims of the infamous 1995 Srebrenica massacre, in which Serb forces
overran a Muslim enclave and slaughtered up to 7,000 Muslim men and boys,
hiding the bodies in mass graves throughout the countryside.
"The Serbs butchered those people,"
Ford says. "When we uncovered the first 450 bodies, we didn't know
which of the 7,000 they were, which village they came from. You could recognize
the remains as humans but not as individuals. The Serbs made it more difficult
by having people exchange clothes and documents before they killed them."
As many as 3,000 bodies from the massacre have
been found so far, but only a small fraction of these have been identified,
says Ford. "It's impossible to identify all of them, but if you can
identify even ten, then you can prove your case against the killers,"
he says. "You might not get the people who pulled the trigger, but
if you can convict those who gave the orders, there will at least be justice
in a sweeping way."
Northeastern law professor Hope Lewis, an authority
on human rights issues, says Ford's work in Bosnia exemplifies the difficult
work faced by human rights lawyers. "Doug had the tough job of gathering
evidence and creating a record of massive human rights violations in Bosnia,"
she says. "This kind of work is vital if international war crimes
tribunals are to have a real impact in punishing and preventing human rights
abuses."
Hurwitz, L'96, worked in Israel immediately after
law school, then joined Ford in Bosnia in 1997. In Sarajevo, she became
director of the International Human Rights Law Group's Bosnia Project,
a role in which she trained Bosnian lawyers to operate in a Western-style
legal system.
"The Bosnian constitution that emerged from
the Dayton agreement provided Bosnians with protections similar to those
in the U.S. Constitution," Hurwitz says. "It gave lawyers a whole
new toolbox to work with." But Bosnian lawyers were unfamiliar with
these protections. "Due process rights, the right to trial, and the
presumption of innocence were virtually unknown there," she says.
"It was our job to train them from the ground up."
Hurwitz's group also promoted women's rights,
challenging oppression, violence, and discrimination. Hurwitz herself drafted
a report detailing abuses against women in Bosnia, including patterns of
domestic violence and rape, and discrimination against women in schools
and the workplace.
This work broke new ground in Bosnia, says Professor
Lewis. "By training lawyers in basic human rights, Deena helped create
a culture in Bosnia in which these rights can begin to have meaning in
people's everyday lives," Lewis says. "And her report on women
showed the specific ways in which women's rights are violated. It's especially
helpful now that the international community has finally begun to pay attention
to violations of women's rights."
Last year, Ford and Hurwitz took a break from
work to get married in Maine and honeymoon in South Africa. Returning to
Bosnia, they worked in cities separated by a three-hour drive over treacherous
mountain roads. A situation like this might be unbearable for most newlyweds,
but Ford and Hurwitz-who met as classmates at Northeastern-are no ordinary
couple.
Before law school, Ford, thirty-nine, worked as
a reporter in Caracas, Venezuela, and Anchorage, Alaska, covering the oil
industry and international business. In Venezuela, he lived for a month
in the Orinoco rain forest among the Yanomami, an ancient tribe struggling
to protect their culture and territory from modern encroachment.
Ford's wanderlust goes back further. While attending
Bowdoin College, the Connecticut native studied abroad in Moscow and Madrid.
After graduating, he rode his bicycle across Europe and Africa, from London
to Lagos, Nigeria.
On co-op in law school, Ford traveled to the border
of Thailand and Burma, where he worked for Earth Rights International,
an environmental law group. He also interned in Washington, D.C., at the
American Bar Association's Central and Eastern European Law Initiative,
a project to promote the rule of law in the new European democracies.
Hurwitz, forty-three, grew up outside of New York
City and graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz. For a
dozen years afterward, she worked as a community activist in California
and led study tours of the Middle East.
Soft-spoken but self-assured, Hurwitz says her
interest in international affairs led her to N.U. School of Law, where
she undertook co-ops in Washington, D.C., with the United Nations High
Commission on Refugees, and in Morocco, with Human Rights Watch, a nongovernmental
group.
"When I came to law school, I didn't have
to look for a purpose," she says. "From the work I'd done before
law school, I knew that I wanted to be a human rights lawyer.
"Of course it helped to have a partner like
Doug," she adds. "And our law school class was very close-knit
and supportive. Basically, I had a really strong foundation to pursue my
work."
Both Ford and Hurwitz say the international law
courses they took at Northeastern with Professors Lewis and Nathaniel Berman
inspired their human rights work.
Now back in Boston, Ford is working as a program
director at PHR's headquarters and Hurwitz recently took the Massachusetts
Bar exam. While leading quieter lives for the moment, they think about
future work in human rights.
"Doug and I will go back into the field at
some point," says Hurwitz. "If you're a human rights lawyer,
that's what you have to do."
Patty Flannery
Leveling the Playing Field for Women in Sports
When Patty Flannery talks about basketball, her eyes light up behind
her round glasses. The topic clearly delights her, and she's an expert
on the sport, from the Boston Celtics to the women's NCAA Final Four. "I'm
a huge basketball fan," she says.
Last year, Flannery, L'88, made her own sports headlines when she won
an $8 million sex discrimination verdict against the National Basketball
Association. Representing a woman whom the league refused to hire as its
first female referee, Flannery sued the NBA under Title VII of the federal
Civil Rights Act of 1964.
This year, in another Title VII case, she is suing the Houston Astros,
claiming the Major League Baseball club fired executive Leslie Ann Leary-a
former Boston Red Sox administrator-because of her gender.
Flannery ranges the courts for college sports, too. In 1992, she successfully
challenged the University of Massachusetts for cutting its women's volleyball,
tennis, and lacrosse teams in violation of Title IX, the federal law that
requires schools receiving government funds to treat male and female athletes
equally. After months of negotiations, UMass reinstated all three teams.
A partner at Thornton, Early & Naumes in Boston, Flannery views
her lawsuits as one way of achieving equality for women in sports. But
so far, such litigation has been rare, and much change is still needed,
she says. "Title IX has been on the books for twenty years, but there
have been only a handful of cases against universities." Title VII
employment cases in sports have been even rarer, with just a few major
cases other than Flannery's filed.
But because women's sports, such as soccer, are on the rise, and because
her cases and others have already succeeded, she thinks this kind of litigation
will increase. "I'd expect to see more suits like this brought on
behalf of women who want to be referees, coaches, and managers at all levels
of sports-professional, college, and even high school," she says.
Today, though, Flannery's work is still breaking new ground. In the
NBA case, for example, plaintiff Sandra Ortiz-del Valle tried for eight
years to get into the league's referee training program. An experienced
referee, she had worked as an official for five years in the amateur men's
New York Pro-Am League. She was also the first woman to referee a game
in the men's professional U.S. Basketball League.
But each time Ortiz-del Valle applied to the NBA's training program,
she was rejected for different reasons. In one instance, the league told
her that she had applied incorrectly. In another, NBA officials said she
wasn't in the proper physical condition. Finally, they told her she lacked
sufficient experience.
Ortiz-del Valle was really rejected because she's female, says her lawyer:
"This woman spent years of her life pursuing her dream and got shot
down every time. They just wouldn't give her a chance. She climbed to the
top of the ladder, but they kicked her in the head when she got there."
In New York federal court, Flannery convinced jurors the NBA was guilty
of sex discrimination, showing that the league had hired ten men with less
experience than Ortiz-del Valle. She even got the NBA's chief referee to
admit on the stand that he would simply throw away Ortiz-del Valle's paperwork
because he didn't think women belonged in the NBA.
The NBA still protested that it didn't discriminate. To prove it, the
league hired two female referees on the eve of Ortiz-del Valle's trial.
But the jury didn't buy it, says Flannery. "The NBA would never have
hired those women if we hadn't filed our lawsuit. It was a transparent
move, and the jury saw through it." Jurors awarded Ortiz-del Valle
$850,000 in damages and slam-dunked the NBA with a $7 million fine for
sex discrimination.
Professor Judith Olans Brown, a gender-discrimination expert at N.U.
Law, believes such groundbreaking verdicts can have a powerful effect on
societal perceptions of women's abilities. "Lawsuits like Patty's
can overturn gender taboos and break down sexual stereotypes," she
says. "Remember all that carrying on years ago about women sportscasters
in the locker room? Now they're common. Women are now basketball referees.
After a while people get used to women in these positions, and it all seems
less strange."
Barry Steinhardt
Guarding the Electronic Frontier for the ACLU
Barry Steinhardt works in cyberspace, defending free speech and privacy
on the Internet. Steinhardt, L'78, is the associate director of the American
Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and chair of its Cyber Liberties Task Force.
Working from the group's national headquarters in Manhattan, he's spent
the last five years fighting digital wiretapping and opposing on-line censorship.
Steinhardt played a key role in the ACLU's lawsuit that overturned the
Communications Decency Act of 1996, a federal law that prohibited the transmission
of "indecent" or "patently offensive" material to minors
over the Internet. In Reno v. ACLU, the group challenged the act, taking
its case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1997 held that
the law violated the First Amendment's free-speech guarantee.
"Reno v. ACLU was the Brown v. Board [of Education] of cyberspace,"
says Steinhardt, referring to the 1954 Supreme Court case that outlawed
racially segregated public schools. "This case set the standard for
free expression on the Internet."
More recently, Steinhardt has been battling the Clinton administration
over encryption, the process by which Internet communications are encoded
for security. While encryption is legal in the U.S., the federal government
has banned the export of "strong encryption" software, which
makes computer files much harder to decode. Federal intelligence agencies
fear that terrorists could use strong encryption to thwart detection efforts.
But the export ban has kept Microsoft and other companies from producing
strong encryption software for the U.S. market.
Steinhardt argues that the lack of strong encryption software only serves
to compromise the on-line privacy of average citizens. "If a terrorist
group wants to encrypt information, it can download strong encryption from
the Internet," he says. "The effect has been to dumb down the
U.S. market, not to keep strong encryption out of the hands of Libyan terrorists."
Professor Stacey Dogan, who teaches courses on computers and the law
at N.U., agrees that encryption is vital to the protection of Internet
users. "Most of us who take advantage of the Internet's wonderful
opportunities have little knowledge of the other, less-evident opportunities
that the Internet presents," she says. "These include the opportunity
for hackers and others to access our most personal information when we
send it unencrypted."
The ACLU and others have challenged the government's encryption policy.
In one case, the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the
encryption ban as it applies to academic cryptographers, holding that encryption
is a form of free speech. That case was brought by the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, a San Francisco group that Steinhardt headed in 1998 while
on leave from the ACLU. This fall, the ACLU is slated to argue a similar
case in the Sixth Circuit.
Another item on Steinhardt's computer screen is a government project
called "Echelon," an effort by the National Security Agency (NSA)
to monitor the world's electronic communications. The NSA has set up a
network of listening stations that intercept up to two million messages
per hour. The messages are funneled to supercomputers that scan them for
certain words and phrases. "It's like a giant vacuum cleaner sucking
up voice and data communications," says Steinhardt.
Echelon was the subject only of rumor for years, until investigative
journalists in Europe broke the story. Since then, it's been discussed
in major U.S. newspapers, and it was the topic of a report by the European
Parliament. "It wasn't taken seriously," Steinhardt says. "It
was treated like an X-Files story. But then it got a fair amount of press
attention, and it could no longer be dismissed as a paranoid fantasy."
U.S. intelligence agencies are prohibited from domestic wiretapping.
But Echelon picks up messages transmitted from foreign locations to recipients
in the U.S., and thereby circumvents the wiretapping ban. The ACLU has
thus been drawn into a new world of international eavesdropping.
"We're now living in a global communications world, and domestic
civil-
liberties organizations like the ACLU face a new reality," Steinhardt
says. "It's no longer enough to rely only on the U.S. Constitution
or to work solely in the United States. The Internet doesn't recognize
geographic borders."
Mary Bonauto
winning Basic Rights for Gays and Lesbians
Case by case, Mary Bonauto is using the law to advance the rights of
gays and lesbians throughout the nation. As the civil rights director of
GLAD-the Boston-based Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders-Bonauto,
L'87, has waged court battles over issues ranging from same-sex marriage
to the right of gays and lesbians to march in Boston's St. Patrick's Day
parade.
A person's sexual preference should make no difference in the eyes of
the law, Bonauto insists. "We want to be held to the same standard
as everyone else, and to take sexual orientation out of the equation. We
are asking for basic rights-the right to work, the right to have a family,
the right to love, and the right to equal treatment in civic life."
In the last decade, Bonauto and GLAD have brought a series of lawsuits
to secure these rights, resulting in an impressive list of wins, and some
notable losses. The most recent victory came in June, when the Massachusetts
Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) ruled that a same-sex parent, unrelated to
a child through blood or adoption, had rights like those of other parents.
It was a big win for the gay community and a stunning break with traditional
family law.
The case involved two lesbian women who had a son together using artificial
insemination. They had signed a parenting agreement and raised the child
together for his first three years. But when they broke up, the biological
mother refused to allow her ex-partner to visit the boy.
Bonauto argued before the SJC that her client had acted as a caregiver
and breadwinner for the family, and was in all important respects the child's
second mother. The biological mother maintained that her former partner
should not have visitation rights because she was not related to the boy
by blood or adoption, the only two relationships that courts have long
recognized as granting parental rights.
In a surprising move, the court sided with Bonauto. It deemed her client
to be a "de facto parent"-a new legal relationship-and expanded
parenting privileges to adults involved in nontraditional family arrangements.
"In the legal world this is breathtaking," says Bonauto. "The
court created a whole new category of people with parental rights."
Same-sex marriage is another family issue at the top of GLAD's priority
list. In Vermont, Bonauto is representing three same-sex couples denied
marriage licenses. They've asked the state's supreme court to declare marriage
a fundamental right, regardless of sexual orientation.
As of this writing, the Vermont high court is still weighing the case.
If the court decides for the gay couples, Vermont will be the first state
to grant gays and lesbians a legal right to marry. (A similar case in Hawaii
is working its way through the state's court system.)
N.U. law professor Jane Scarborough, a specialist in sexual orientation
and the law, says the Vermont case could be the one to give gay and lesbian
couples the same options as straight couples. "It's a controversial
issue, even in the gay community," she says. "Many gays and lesbians
see marriage as an oppressive institution. Not everyone would want to get
married. But the government does privilege marriage, and many benefits
are available to married people. What's important about these cases is
to gain the right of individual choice that everyone else has-to have this
right that most people consider a birthright."
Bonauto and GLAD have also lost a few big cases. The most important
of these was a 1995 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the
veterans' group that organizes the South Boston St. Patrick's Day parade
could lawfully prohibit a gay and lesbian contingent from marching. The
court decided the case on First Amendment grounds and held that forcing
the parade organizers to admit the gay marchers would compromise their
freedom of expression.
But Bonauto continues to fight for gay rights on many different fronts,
including employment discrimination, same-sex harassment, domestic partnership
benefits, and anti-gay ballot initiatives. She believes that law is the
best way to achieve equal rights-and to change people's feelings about
gays and lesbians.
"Law creates a framework for what's considered fair and just,"
she says. "So every time you can move the ball forward, you've done
something important."
Neil Leifer
BACKing Lead Paint Makers into a Corner
Neil Leifer, L'81, represented Massachusetts in the commonwealth's
lawsuit against the tobacco industry. Now his sights are set on another
target: the former makers of lead paint.
Leifer's not alone. Many of the lawyers who fought Big Tobacco are lining
up to sue Glidden, Sherwin-Williams, and other companies that made lead
paint before it was banned by the federal government in 1978. The lawyers
claim that for decades these companies covered up evidence of lead paint's
harmful effects to children's nervous systems and fought government regulation.
They also say these corporations have never paid a cent to the thousands
of children harmed by their products.
"The industry is responsible for child lead poisoning," Leifer
says. "They promoted lead paint for years after they knew it was dangerous
to kids. And they have never done anything to help solve the health problem.
It's time they were held responsible."
A partner at Thornton, Early & Naumes in Boston, Leifer has already
invested a dozen years in fighting for lead-poisoned children. In 1987,
he filed the first-ever lawsuit against lead paint makers. His client in
that case was Maria Santiago, a sixteen-year-old Dorchester resident, who
Leifer says suffered learning problems from ingesting lead paint as a young
girl.
"Tragically, [lead poisoning] happens mostly to kids who have the
fewest socioeconomic advantages and can least afford it," he says.
"The vast majority of lead-poisoned children are poor, mostly minorities,
living in older apartments in urban areas."
A federal judge in Boston ruled that Leifer couldn't prove which company
made the paint that injured Santiago. Leifer tried to convince the judge
to apply a "market-share" theory of liability, whereby paint
makers would pay damages proportional to their share of the lead p