Bio
Lee Rowland () is policy director at the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), the ACLU in New York. She was previously a senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. Lee has extensive experience as a litigator, lobbyist, and public speaker. She has served as lead counsel in federal First Amendment cases involving public employee speech rights, the First Amendment rights of community advocates, government regulation of digital speech, and state secrecy surrounding the lethal injection process. She also authors amicus briefs and blogs on topics including the intersection of speech and privacy, student and public employee speech, obscenity, and the Communications Decency Act.
While at the ACLU, Lee has served as an adjunct clinical professor for NYU Law’s Technology Law and Policy Clinic, a member of the New York Bar Association’s Communications and Media Law Committee, and an adjunct faculty member in the Human Rights Program at the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College. Lee was previously a voting rights counsel with the Brennan Center for Justice; and before that, ran the Reno office of the ACLU of Nevada, where she regularly argued before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and the Nevada Supreme Court. Lee is a graduate of Middlebury College and Harvard Law School.
Featured work
Aug 8, 2016
An Impolitic Situation: When Rights Disappear
Jul 13, 2016
The Police in Baton Rouge Don’t Like It When Protesters Exercise Their Rights, So We’re Taking Them to Court
Jun 2, 2016
In This Poor, Black, Polluted Alabama Town, Speaking Up Gets You Sued
Mar 15, 2016
Is It Okay to Kick People Out of Campaign Rallies? That Depends.
Dec 11, 2015
Turning Tech Companies Into Spies Won’t Work
Oct 2, 2015
The Government’s Trying to Sell a New Slant on the First Amendment. We’re Not Buying It. (Updated)
Sep 22, 2015
Why the ACLU and the Government Are Teaming Up
Jul 22, 2015
Why Texas Is Wrong and South Carolina Is Right on the Confederate Flag
Jul 10, 2015
VICTORY! Federal Judge Deep-Sixes Arizona’s Ridiculously Overbroad ‘Nude Photo’ Law