Nadine Strossen

Nadine Strossen is an American legal scholar and civil liberties advocate who was president of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1991 to 2008 and the first woman to lead it. Born in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1950, she studied history and literature at Radcliffe College and took her Juris Doctor magna cum laude at Harvard Law School in 1975, where she edited the Harvard Law Review. She clerked for a year at the Minnesota Supreme Court, practised privately in Minneapolis and then at Sullivan and Cromwell in New York, and in 1984 began teaching as an associate professor of clinical law at New York Law School, where she is now a professor. She specialised in constitutional law, federal courts and human rights. She joined the ACLU national board in 1983, served as its general counsel from 1986 to 1991, and won the presidency on the second ballot in 1990, resigning in May 2008 and being succeeded by Susan Herman.