Lee Gelernt, the attorney at the center of the American Civil Liberties Union litigation opposing the travel ban, will deliver the inaugural lecture of the Paul A. Rosen Constitutional Law Speaker Series, Thursday, Oct. 4 at Wayne State University Law School.
Gelernt, who is deputy director of the of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, will discuss his work related to travel ban litigation and other high-profile cases.
The event will be from 12:15 to 1:15 p.m. in the Spencer M. Partrich Auditorium at the Law School, 471 W. Palmer St. Lunch will be provided. Parking is $8 (credit or debit card only) in Parking Structure No. 1 across West Palmer Street from Wayne Law. The event is free and open to the public, but registration is required by Monday, Oct. 1 at rsvp.wayne.edu/ rosenlecture18.
Gelernt has been an attorney with the ACLU since 1992 and works on immigration and national security issues. He also is director of the Immigrants’ Rights Project’s program on Access to the Courts. In addition to his work at the ACLU, he is an adjunct professor at Columbia Law School and a visiting lecturer in clinical law at Yale Law School.
During the past 18 months, he has argued several groundbreaking challenges to Trump administration policies, and successfully argued the first case challenging the president’s travel ban on individuals from certain Muslim-majority nations, which resulted in a federal court in Brooklyn issuing a nationwide Saturday night injunction against the ban one day after the president enacted it and eight days after his inauguration.
Galernt is currently litigating a national class action involving the Trump administration’s practice of separating immigrant families at the border.
Over his career, Gelernt has argued dozens of notable civil rights cases at all levels of the federal court system, including in the U.S. Supreme Court and the Courts of Appeals for the First, Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, Ninth, and Eleventh Circuits. He has also testified as an expert before the U.S. Senate. Gelernt has received numerous honors for his work over the years, and in 2017 was recognized by Lawdragon as one of the 500 leading lawyers in the country in any field.
In addition to his immigration-related work, Gelernt has litigated several far-reaching national security cases arising out of the events of September 11 and served as one of only a few human rights observers at Guantanamo Bay for the first military trial conducted by the United States since World II. In March 2011, Gelernt argued the case of Ashcroft v. al-Kidd in the U.S. Supreme Court, which challenged the constitutionality of the government’s post 9-11 policy of using the federal material witness statute to investigate and preventively detain terrorism suspects in cases where was no probable cause to justify a criminal arrest.
Gelernt also successfully argued one of the very first major September 11 cases to reach the federal courts of appeals, Detroit Free Press v. Ashcroft, where he represented the media in their lawsuit seeking to prevent the government from holding secret deportation hearings after September 11. In its decision invalidating the government’s secret hearing policy, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals stated that “democracies die behind closed doors” – a phrase that became one of the most cited and well-known admonitions issued by the judiciary in the aftermath of September 11.
Bernard Mindell, Wayne Law class of 1964; Barry Waldman, Wayne Law class of 1969; and Bob Garvey, a trial attorney in St. Clair Shores, established the Paul A. Rosen Constitutional Law Speaker Series Endowment in 2017 to commemorate their friend Paul A. Rosen’s passion for constitutional law. Rosen graduated from Wayne Law in 1964.
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