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COLUMBIA COLLEGE TODAY
COLUMBIA COLLEGE TODAY NORMAN DORSEN ’50
A PASSION FOR
CIVIL
LIBERTIES
B y V a l e r i e Seiling Jacobs
W
For more than a
half-century, Norman
Dorsen ’50 has fought
for fundamental
freedoms and against
discriminatory
legislation
hen Norman Dorsen ’50 arrived at Columbia College in fall 1946, he was not
your average freshman. First, there was his age. At 16, he was younger than
most of his classmates. And then there was his physical appearance. Though at
5-foot-10½ he was tall enough to snag a spot on the JV basketball team, he was,
in his own words, “not physically prepossessing,” especially when compared
to the many WWII veterans who were flooding the University thanks to the
G.I. Bill. Adding to Dorsen’s sense of isolation was the fact that he still lived
at home. While other students socialized on campus, he generally trundled
home on the subway to his parents’ apartment on West End Avenue and 92nd
Street — where he worried obsessively about his grades. Indeed, listening to
Dorsen’s description of his college-age self (“I was pretty pathetic,” he says,
laughing), one pictures a scrawny, naïve kid adrift in a sea of strapping, savvy
undergraduates.
But that image, like so many of Dorsen’s stories about himself, is too modest.
In fact, Dorsen was the high scorer on the JV team during his sophomore
year and later was promoted to varsity. And buried in those anecdotes are the
seeds of his later success, including the intellectual acumen and work ethic that
propelled him to Phi Beta Kappa, the Harvard Law Review, a Fulbright Scholarship
and an endowed chair at NYU Law. Dorsen became one of the most
influential civil liberties lawyers in the country, leading the American Civil Liberties
Union’s (ACLU) efforts for several decades and spearheading scores of
legal challenges to discriminatory legislation and other injustices. Name almost
any civil liberties controversy since the 1960s — from a woman’s right to an
abortion, to a minor’s right to a due process hearing, to the government’s right
to conduct warrantless electronic surveillance — and Dorsen’s name surfaces.
He has famously defended even the most unpopular parties in the cause of
preserving free speech and other fundamental freedoms, including the Nazis’
right to march through Skokie, Ill., a town that in 1977 had a large population
of Holocaust survivors. Dorsen has received so many accolades that NYU Law
has set up a special seminar room to hold the photographs, plaques and other
memorabilia from his long and distinguished career.
Dorsen cannot recall the exact moment his passion for civil liberties began, but
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(Top) Photos on the walls of Norman Dorsen ’50’s office at NYU
attest to the remarkable breadth of his career.
PHOTO: THOMAS F. FERGUSON ’74
(Left) Dorsen with the late Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan
Jr. in the 1970s.
(Above) Left to right, Claudio Grossman, dean of the Washington
College of Law at American University, Supreme Court Justice Stephen
Breyer and Dorsen at the Breyer-Scalia debate in 2005.
PHOTOS: COURTESY NORMAN DORSEN ’50