Bio
Lee Rowland (@berkitron) 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
![A man holding the American flag after a naturalization ceremony.](https://assets.aclu.org/live/uploads/2020/05/American-Samoa-Citizenship-Header-Image-400x266.jpg)
Aug 26, 2021
Jill Lepore on What It Means to be an American Citizen
![1st amendment ad campaign](https://assets.aclu.org/live/uploads/2019/09/web17-1stamend-1160x768-400x266.jpg)
Aug 9, 2017
The First Amendment (Literally) Banned in DC
![The Slants](https://assets.aclu.org/live/uploads/2019/09/web17-blog-slants-1160x768-v2-400x266.jpg)
Jun 19, 2017
Victory! The Slants Are Officially Rock Stars of the First Amendment
![Protest outside Supreme Court](https://assets.aclu.org/live/uploads/2019/09/web17-protestaclusign-1160x768-400x266.jpg)
Feb 17, 2017
Where Protests Flourish, Anti-Protest Bills Follow
![Ben Eaton, Mary Schaeffer, Esther Calhoun, and Ellis Long (from left to right)](https://assets.aclu.org/live/uploads/2019/09/blog16-uniontown_defendants-1160x768-400x266.jpg)
Feb 9, 2017
Small-Town Activists Stand Up to a Coal Ash Landfill and Win a Major Victory for Free Speech
![The First Amendment](https://assets.aclu.org/live/uploads/2019/09/blog16-firstamendment-1160x768-400x266.jpg)
Nov 29, 2016
No, President-Elect Trump, You Can’t Get Locked Up or Lose Your American Citizenship for Political Speech