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NORMAN DORSEN ’50
COLUMBIA COLLEGE TODAY
COLUMBIA COLLEGE TODAY NORMAN DORSEN ’50
there were hints of his liberal leanings during his undergraduate
years. He recalls one professor who labeled his opinions “a little
spicy” — a characterization that Dorsen does not dispute. “I was
no radical,” he says, laughing again, “but I definitely had views.”
It may have been that outspokenness that brought him to the
attention of the Office of the Secretary of the Army in 1954 when,
only a year out of Harvard Law, he was tapped to help represent
the Army during the McCarthy hearings. With only four
people on the Army’s legal team, Dorsen played a critical, albeit
behind-the-scenes, role: He was responsible for preparing the legal
memoranda and other documents needed for the weeks of
testimony. While Americans watched on television, a relatively
new medium at that time, Dorsen got an up-close look at Sen.
Joseph R. McCarthy and his counsel, Roy Cohn ’46, ’47L, a man
whom Dorsen describes as being “even less sensitive to individual
rights than his boss.”
McCarthy’s behavior — what Dorsen once described as his
rude interruptions, his crude jokes at the expense of others and,
most important, his frequent
aspersions on the loyalty of his
perceived enemies — left a lasting
impression. And the experience
(“an extraordinary morality
play,” he says) cemented his
commitment to protecting civil
liberties and changed his life.
“There is no doubt that being
confronted by the McCarthy
crowd, and in particular by Roy
Cohn, sensitized me to issues of
fairness in hearings and other
proceedings and the drastic
harm that the government can
do to free expression,” Dorsen
says. “This experience led me
to become a civil libertarian.”
So Dorsen was “overjoyed”
when, in 1961, after two federal
clerkships, including one
with Supreme Court Justice
John Marshall Harlan, and a
brief stint practicing law in
New York City, he was offered
a faculty position and the directorship of the Arthur Garfield
Hays Civil Liberties Program at NYU Law. It was there he met
his wife, Harriette, a woman who shared his liberal views (she
became one of the country’s most influential publishing lawyers)
and with whom he raised three daughters.
Running the civil liberties program at NYU proved a daunting
task. The program, which had been established three
years earlier in memory of Hays, also a Columbia alumnus
(Class of 1902, 1905L) and a former general counsel of the
ACLU, was floundering. The two previous directors had resigned.
“Three strikes and you’re out,” Dorsen recalls the dean saying. It
was up to Dorsen to stabilize the situation.
He did much more than that. He turned the program into
what Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr. later called
“the most effective and important center in the country for the
training of law students for public service on behalf of individual
rights.” Under Dorsen’s direction, the program has provided
practical, hands-on instruction for hundreds of fellows, many
As general counsel (1969–76) and president (1976–91) of the ACLU,
Dorsen fought for the constitutional rights of various groups, including
women and children.
PHOTO: COURTESY NORMAN DORSEN ’50
of whom continue to work in the public interest as civil liberties
lawyers in government and legal services organizations and as
law professors.
One of those former fellows is Judith Resnik, now the Arthur
Liman Professor at Yale Law. According to Resnik, Dorsen’s egalitarian
attitude toward students and his willingness to engage with
them critically set the program apart. She tells how Dorsen listened
to students “who may not agree with him” and always provided
room for genuine debate. And he matched that open-mindedness
with an open-door policy, instructing his assistant never to ask who
visitors were or what they wanted. He made it a practice to answer
his own phone whenever he could. But it was his vision, Resnik
explains, that made the program so successful. “He was ahead of
the curve,” she says. “Not just once, but over and over again.”
In 1967, for example, Dorsen challenged the constitutionality
of Arizona’s juvenile court procedures after a 15-year-old
boy was sentenced to six years in prison for making an obscene
phone call, even though he had not been provided with an opportunity
to confront witnesses,
given written notice of the
charges or provided with an
attorney. It was, Dorsen says,
the “worst of both worlds,” a
system where children were
“subjected to the kind of incarceration
and criminal penalties
that adults were, but without
the protections of the Bill of
Rights that adults had if accused
of the same thing.” The
case, which Dorsen successfully
argued before the Supreme
Court, extended constitutional
guarantees to juveniles, a group
that previously had been without
such protections.
In another groundbreaking
case a year later, Dorsen convinced
the Supreme Court that
a Louisiana statute that denied
“illegitimate” children the right
to recover damages for the
wrongful death of their mother
violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
The case was important not only because it granted constitutional
protections to children born out of wedlock but also because it suggested
that discrimination based on criteria other than race could
trigger a high level of scrutiny by the courts. The case helped pave
the way for other discrimination cases based on non-race classifications,
including gender.
It was that kind of vision that prompted the ACLU to offer
Dorsen a leadership position within the organization — first as
general counsel (1969–76) and then as president (1976–91). With
the ACLU’s backing, Dorsen continued to fight for the constitutional
rights of children, prisoners, war protesters, homosexuals,
women and the indigent. In 1969, he brought one of the earliest
petitions for Supreme Court review of alleged discrimination
against a gay man. And in 1971, he argued the first abortion
rights case before the Supreme Court, a case that prefigured Roe
v. Wade, where he also was counsel of record. Dorsen also wrote
amicus curiae briefs in a number of other landmark cases, including
Gideon v. Wainwright, U.S. v. Nixon and the Pentagon Papers
case. Indeed, during his tenure, the ACLU was involved in some
of the most famous civil liberties cases in U.S. history.
Dorsen also played a critical role within the ACLU itself, especially
after the fallout from the infamous Skokie case. In spring
1977, when the ACLU announced that it would defend the Nazis’
right to march through that Chicago suburb, 4,000 members of
the ACLU wrote letters in protest. Within months, the organization
lost more than 30,000 supporters. By the end of the year, the
number had grown to 41,000 (more than 25 percent of the ACLU’s
total membership) and the organization was on the verge of bankruptcy.
Anthony Romero, the ACLU’s current executive director,
puts it bluntly: “We were faced with extinction.”
Once again, Dorsen rose to the occasion. First, he refocused
the debate on the First Amendment, reminding critics that even
the most unpopular speakers are entitled to free speech. He was
unflappable, recalls Romero, an important skill given the escalating
tensions. He soothed frayed relationships with former supporters
and attracted new members without compromising the
ACLU’s core goals. “His ability
to remain cool and focused
was absolutely essential for
the organization at the time,”
Romero says.
Second, Dorsen set out to
solve the ACLU’s internal problems.
His knowledge of the law,
as well as what Romero calls
the nuts and bolts of the organization,
afforded him a unique
perspective and enabled him to
help shape policies and facilitate
board decisions that would
ultimately right the organization.
“He was the quintessential
senior statesman, quietly
exercising leadership behind
the scenes,” Romero says. By
the time Ronald Reagan entered
the White House in 1981,
the ACLU’s membership was
growing again, its finances and
management were stable and it
was well positioned to defend
against the next round of civil rights abuses.
Dorsen, for his part, is quick to deflect praise. “It’s such a big
story — no one person is responsible,” he says, speaking of the AC-
LU’s success. While that technically may be true, other evidence
points to the importance of Dorsen’s diplomacy. As J. Anthony Lukas,
the late Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, observed
in The New York Times as early as 1978, Dorsen had a “magic touch
for healing organizational wounds.” And Dorsen’s team-building
skills have been a recurring theme in the myriad tributes to him: he
received a Medal of Liberty from the French Minister of Justice in
1983, the Eleanor Roosevelt Human Rights Award from President
Clinton in 2000 and the first lifetime achievement award from the
Association of American Law Schools in 2007, to name but a few.
Dorsen recognizes the value of his ability to bring people together.
“If I do something myself,” he says, “that’s one thing, but
unleashing the capacities and energies of people toward mutual
goals is a way of multiplying the impact and effectiveness one
can have.” In fact, his ability to forge alliances helped him found
a global consortium of legal scholars, a task that took years of
Dorsen accepts an award from the Society of American Law Teachers
from Co-presidents Carol Chomsky (left) and Margaret Montoya in 2000.
PHOTO: COURTESY NORMAN DORSEN ’50
effort and culminated in 2002 with the publication of IgCON, a
new international journal of constitutional law. He employed
those same talents when he joined forces with other law professors
to organize the International Association of Law Schools and
became the founding president of the Society of American Law
Teachers.
But the real secret to Dorsen’s success may be how personable
he is, even with those who disagree with him. His
friendships cross party lines and extend from Manhattan,
where he has an apartment, to the quiet corners of
Cornwall, Conn., where he spends weekends (Harriette died in
2011). On visits to Washington, D.C., he’s been known to dine
with the legal elite — regardless of their political leanings. “He’s
a likeable fellow who likes to be liked, even if it’s by the likes of
Antonin Scalia,” Romero says, hastening to add: “But just to be
clear, he has a very discerning mind.”
Of his ability to remain friendly — even with those who oppose
his liberal views — Dorsen
simply shrugs. “No mind
has ever been changed at a
dinner party,” he says.
Perhaps that explains why he
continues to pursue justice in
other venues. Most days you
can find Dorsen in his office
on Washington Square, working
on another speech or law review
article. He recently finished
editing a volume of the last
11 lectures from NYU’s James
Madison lecture series, which
are delivered only by Supreme
Court justices and U.S. Court
of Appeals judges. And he remains
co-director of the law
school’s Arthur Garfield Hays
Civil Liberties Program, where
he takes an active role in training
civil rights lawyers.
Dorsen still answers his
own phone and types his own
letters, many of them on the
manual typewriter that sits on a stand beside his desk; the
bulky gray Royal dates to the 1960s, a tangible reminder of just
how long Dorsen has been at this. He also still teaches, though
his course load has been reduced to make room for other responsibilities
(he is counselor to the university’s president and
recently agreed to chair a major study on multi-school programs).
And he continues to be involved in the ACLU, both
as a member of its National Advisory Council and an informal
adviser to its current officers. In fact, in recognition of his
more than 50 years of outstanding service, the ACLU recently
announced the establishment of the “Norman Dorsen Presidential
Prize,” one of only two prizes awarded by the organization.
It is a fitting tribute to a man whose life personifies the
ACLU’s motto: “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”
Valerie Seiling Jacobs is a freelance writer, an M.F.A. candidate in
the School of the Arts and a teaching fellow in the College’s University
Writing Program. Before turning to writing, she practiced corporate law.
Thomas F. Ferguson ’74 contributed to this article.
SPRING 2013
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SPRING 2013
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