Alumni Gazette

Defending Detainee Rights

After reading To Kill a Mockingbird, 10-year-old Barbara Olshansky ’82 decided that when she grew up, she wanted to be like Atticus Finch, the novel’s courageous attorney who defends a black man against an undeserved rape charge.

More than three decades later, Olshansky still draws on the inspiration of Harper Lee’s idealistic lawyer, defending unpopular clients from Guantanamo Bay to Iraq.

The deputy litigation director of the Manhattan-based Center for Constitutional Rights, Olshansky was the lead attorney who successfully argued last year before the Supreme Court that the U.S. government’s treatment of more than 500 alleged “enemy combatants” detained at Guantanamo in Cuba was unconstitutional. The court ruled that the detainees, captured during the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, could not be held indefinitely without access to legal counsel or the ability to challenge the legality of their incarceration.

She also represents Iraqi citizens who claim they were tortured at the hands of the U.S. government’s private prison contractors.

“I relate to Atticus Finch because I like to fight for people who can’t fight for themselves,” says Olshansky, who lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Craig. “It’s what I believe in, and I have the luxury of doing what I believe in.”

Olshansky also pursues cases on the home front, representing African Americans who want the New York City Fire Department to change its recruiting practices to attract more racial minorities. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission recently found probable cause for discrimination, so Olshansky wants to negotiate a resolution to the complaint. If that doesn’t occur, she’ll head to federal court.

In another case, pending in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, she represents Latino and African- American teachers from the Caribbean who say New York City’s teacher certification tests are discriminatory.

The Guantanamo case brought Olshansky into the international spotlight, and up against some of the U.S. government’s top attorneys. Despite the Supreme Court ruling, the case is far from over. A federal judge in January found that the hearings set up to comply with the decision did not meet constitutional standards.

“Barbara more than holds her own against very highly skilled lawyers,” says John Givens, retired chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, who worked with her on the Guantanamo case. “From the beginning, she recognized that the government had created a legal black hole, in which it would not be accountable to anyone.”

The daughter of a concert pianist, Olshansky grew up in New York City’s northern suburbs in Ossining, home to Sing Sing prison. After graduating early from high school, she spent what would have been her senior year in Israel, learning about conflict resolution. She was in the Knesset in 1977 when Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was the first Arab to speak before the Israeli parliament.

Olshansky brought her viola to Rochester, thinking she’d major in music. But her interest in world affairs led her to European intellectual history and political science, building a strong foundation for law school at Stanford University. There, she was surprised that most fledgling lawyers hadn’t the slightest intention of becoming the next Atticus Finch. But she met a few like-minded souls. And those students founded the East Palo Alto Community Law Project, which provided legal services to low-income residents near the Stanford campus.

After graduation, Olshansky found inspiration for a career in public-service law as a clerk for Rose Bird, then chief justice of the California Supreme Court.

“She believed that the judicial system was for helping people,” she says. “She made me believe I could make a difference.”

After working in a small plaintiff’s employment discrimination firm in New York, she spent four years at the Environmental Defense Fund, working on issues involving workplace and community exposure to toxins. She moved to the Center for Constitutional Rights in 1995, joining a small nonprofit firm that allows her to expand her workload to include cases that address issues of racial justice and social and economic rights.

It’s a law firm on the cutting edge of issues embraced by the political left. But as Olshansky defends the detainees at Guantanamo and opposes what she sees as the excesses of the war on terror, she has become a steadfast defender of the U.S. Constitution.

“Oddly enough, I’ve become a weirdly patriotic person, who truly believes in the viability of democratic institutions,” she says. “The courts and Congress need to reign in the executive branch. I learned about the separation of powers in fifth grade, and during the Guantanamo case, I live it every day.”

—David McKay Wilson

Wilson is a New York–based freelance writer.