Deborah Goldberg

Deborah Goldberg was the Managing Attorney of Earthjustice's Northeast regional office, where she supervised and conducted legal advocacy and litigation related to global warming and environmental health. Her arrival at Earthjustice in July 2008 marked a return to the practice of environmental law, where she spent the first decade of her legal career. As an attorney at the law firms Berle, Kass & Case and Arnold & Porter, she concentrated in cases involving environmental impact review, historic preservation, and hazardous waste issues. She was lead counsel at the U.S. Supreme Court for the county intervenors in New York v. United States, 505 U.S. 144 (1992) (overturning portions of the Low Level Radioactive Waste Policy Amendments Act). While in private practice, she also co-authored with Michael B. Gerrard the environmental law column of the New York Law Journal.

She was lead counsel to the intervenor in Nixon v. Shrink Missouri Government PAC, 528 U.S. 377 (2000), in which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld low contribution limits against First Amendment challenge), and she has litigated numerous other constitutional cases. Her recent publications include Interest Group Participation in Judicial Elections, in RUNNING FOR JUDGE (NYU Press forthcoming 2006), and Writing Reform: A Guide to Drafting State & Local Campaign Finance Laws (4th rev. ed. 2004).

Her commentary appears regularly in the national and regional print media as well as on local TV and radio stations throughout the country. She has testified before Congress and state legislative bodies on matters ranging from campaign finance reform to felony disenfranchisement.

Following graduation from Harvard Law School (J.D., cum laude, 1986), Ms. Goldberg clerked for two federal judges – Justice Stephen G. Breyer, then serving on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, and the late Judge Constance Baker Motley of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York – and spent nearly 10 years as an environmental lawyer in private practice. Before law school, she obtained a Ph.D. in philosophy from the Johns Hopkins University (1980) and taught ethics and political philosophy at the graduate and undergraduate levels for three years at Columbia University.