Susan Herman: Promoter of Civil Liberties, Future Lawyers, and the Legacy of Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Professor Susan Herman is one of five professors retiring after this spring semester. To share a memory or to send greetings to Professor Herman, please send an email to communications@brooklaw.edu with the subject line "Professor Herman Retirement." She would love to hear from her former students and colleagues.
Professor Susan Herman is a highly regarded authority on constitutional and criminal procedure topics, but her greatest hidden talent is time management. In addition to spending 46 years teaching at Brooklyn Law School, she doubled as the president of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) for a dozen of those years, masterfully weaving the two positions together.
In her 12 years as ACLU president and 32 years on the board of directors, she led the organization through watershed moments ranging from the challenges of the first Trump administration to the COVID-19 pandemic; the proliferation of state laws limiting liberties such as voting rights and reproductive freedom; and the infliction of unequal treatment on racial minorities and LGBTQ+ people. Students benefited from Herman being at the center of a wide variety of current legal issues.
"There was a wonderful synergy between my two roles because I got to bring a lot of the current work that I was doing at the ACLU into what I was teaching," Herman said. "I was able to invite ACLU speakers to come and meet the students and speak at the school, and I also introduced students to the ACLU. One very popular item that I put up for the BLSPI (Brooklyn Law Students for the Public Interest) Auction was to come with me to a national board of directors meeting to meet civil libertarians from all around the country. One year that went for $1,300."
Fittingly, Herman is also the inaugural Ruth Bader Ginsburg Professor of Law, a title that honors the dynamic Supreme Court Justice, a "Brooklyn girl" and former ACLU counsel like Herman herself, and someone she got to know professionally as a mentor. "I have really valued being the Ruth Bader Ginsburg Professor of Law, because how often is it that you can become inspired by looking at your email signature?" she asked.
Herman retires this spring with an inspiring legacy of her own: as a teacher, scholar, and fearless civil liberties advocate.
Early Exposure to Civil Liberties
Born in Brooklyn, Herman was raised in nearby Long Beach, Long Island. One of Herman’s favorite stories is how in third grade, the public school she attended was putting on a play about Johnny Tremain, a boy who became involved in the American Revolution. Eager to learn more about the story, Herman went to the library to find the book on which the play was based.
"Sure enough, there it was on the shelf. So, I took it down, gave it to the librarian, and told her I would like to take that book out," Herman said. "And the librarian told me: 'Dear, you can't take that out. It's in the boys' section.' And this was news to me. I had regularly been taking books out of the girls’ section -- biographies of presidents’ wives, collections of fairy tales and the occasional Clara Barton or Florence Nightingale – but it had never occurred to me that I was not allowed to borrow any books beyond that limited selection."
When Herman told her mother what happened, "she was furious." She called the school librarian to complain: 'How dare you tell my daughter what books she can and can’t read!'
"So, the next day the librarian told me I could take out that book and I could take out any book I wanted, but I should just please tell my mother not to call anymore," Herman said. The school eliminated the gender-based book policy a few months later.
"My mother was the first civil libertarian I knew," Herman said. "She was my first example of speaking up about an unjust rule."
That story, Herman said, is echoed in current debates over the restrictions on LGBTQ+ books in school libraries. As the first ACLU executive director, Roger Nash Baldwin, used to say, "No civil liberties battle ever remains won."
Herman attended Barnard College and went on to NYU Law School with the idea, "as a child of the '60s," that she wanted to "change the world through law."
After graduation, she served as Pro Se Law Clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Her next job was as a staff attorney and then Associate Director of Prisoners’ Legal Services of New York, where she represented prisoners who thought they were unjustly incarcerated or had grievances about prison conditions. But "every time we figured out how to win cases, the Supreme Court stacked the deck against us even higher. Both prisoners’ rights and habeas corpus law were being designed with the sole purpose of preventing prisoners from winning cases – and even from filing them," Herman said. "I began to feel that I wanted to be in a place where I could talk back to the Supreme Court more effectively. I decided that beyond whatever I could do on my own as a litigator, a far more lasting contribution to the development of the law would be to help train future lawyers and to write critically about the law."
A Love of Teaching
For Herman, the best part of teaching has been the students.
"Teaching might seem like doing the same thing year after year, but you’re not, because every classroom is different," she said. "The students, the energy, and what they want to learn are always different." For first-year students, for example, everything is new, while upperclass students can dive more deeply into both doctrine and theory because they know the basics."
During fall 2025 semester, "Current Issues in Constitutional Law" addressed the mind-boggling array of constitutional issues precipitated by the second Trump administration.
"It was an amazing experience, having these very smart and committed third-year students who really wanted to delve into everything that was going on," Herman said. "Doing it as a seminar was wonderful because each of them would take an issue and take responsibility for presenting that issue to the class."
One example: one student did a presentation analyzing the different laws involved in sending the National Guard to the streets of Los Angeles as opposed to Washington, D.C. – an analysis Herman found superior to anything appearing in public media.
The discussions could get very intense, and in some ways became akin to group therapy, but Herman made sure the discussion included attention to both sides of issues.
"The ACLU is rigorously nonpartisan," Herman said. "Although we’ve done a lot of work on voting rights, we've never gotten involved in the elections themselves. I also felt that it was appropriate in front of the classroom to be nonpartisan and not take sides, so that there would be space for students to offer their own points of view, even if those views were different from mine or from most of the rest of the class. I often told classes, for the benefit of students who might be nervous about saying something they thought their classmates or I might not agree with, that they could always preface a comment with the words 'It could be argued that ...' and then we would all be reminded to consider the substance of what was being said rather than judging or labeling the student."
A Conversation with Ruth Bader Ginsburg
A prolific speaker, Herman used to provide regular updates on Supreme Court activities for the Federal Judicial Center. At one such event, the audience of district and court of appeals judges included then-Judge Ginsburg, who served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 1980 to 1993. The topic was the Batson cases, which impose constitutional limitations on the use of peremptory challenges in jury selection. The Supreme Court had ruled that prosecutors can’t systematically eliminate potential jurors from the jury box on the basis of race.
"Somebody who was sitting behind a tall person in the first row asked me if I thought that same theory would apply to systematically eliminating women from juries," Herman recalled. "When people moved around a bit, I could see that it was Ruth Bader Ginsburg who had asked the question."
Herman responded that indeed, she did think the same theory should apply to gender-based peremptory challenges. After the talk, Ginsburg approached Herman, took her by the arm, and led her off to speak further, announcing to anyone they passed that Herman was the best speaker of the day. Other judges later told Herman that they had wanted to comment on her presentation or ask a question, but were afraid to interrupt the conversation with Ginsburg, who was already a prominent figure in legal circles. "But you were talking with Ruth Bader Ginsburg," several said, in awed tones. "Everybody deferred to her; she was just magic," Herman recalled.
A postscript to that discussion: Justice Ginsburg was part of the majority when the Supreme Court ruled in 1994 that peremptory challenges based solely on a prospective juror's sex are unconstitutional, in J.E.B. v. Alabama. "She didn't write the opinion, but she was on the Court and probably talked some of her colleagues into that conclusion in the same way that, as an ACLU lawyer, she had talked a majority of an all-male Supreme Court into the whole idea that gender discrimination was invidious discrimination," Herman said.
When Herman was elected ACLU president in 2008, Ginsburg sent her a letter on Supreme Court stationery that remains a treasured keepsake in her office: "Glad to know your secure hand is at the helm," she wrote, signing herself, "Ruth."
"I learned later that consistent with that little note, RBG was an amazing mentor of girls and women in ways that were completely behind the scenes, encouraging women, inviting girls to visit her in chambers, and fighting every day in very personal ways for gender equity," Herman said.
BLS Connections
In Herman’s office there is also a photo of the Brooklyn Law School Class of 1932, featuring her father, Nathan Herman ’32. It’s a family keepsake as well as a symbol of what the Law School was at that time.
"In addition to my father, who grew up on the Lower East Side as the son of Jewish immigrants, that photo includes several women. Brooklyn Law School welcomed women and people of color too, at a time when other law schools were not admitting anyone but white men, and Harvard wasn’t admitting Jews," Herman said. "So, that photo offers a history of the law school as well as of my family."
Herman arrived at Brooklyn Law School at a historic time, too. The school was undergoing a transformation from a regional law school to a nationally recognized one, thanks in large measure to Herman and the four other professors retiring this year: Professor Stacy Caplow, who joined the faculty in 1976; Professor Joel Gora, who came aboard in 1978; Maryellen Fullerton, the Suzanne J. and Norman Miles Professor of Law, who joined in 1980—the same year as Herman —and Professor Aaron Twerski, the Irwin and Jill Cohen Professor of Law, who began teaching at BLS in 1986.
Friends at other law schools were especially envious of the sizeable cohort of female professors at Brooklyn Law School, said Herman. She and Caplow have vacationed together, written amicus briefs together, and always have a lot to talk about while walking around the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Herman, Caplow, and Fullerton are mothers of similarly aged children and have appreciated supporting each other through the many stages of parenting and professional development over the years.
It was Gora, a former ACLU lawyer, who recruited Herman to join the BLS faculty. "He said to me, 'I like going to work every day, I like my colleagues,'" Herman recalled. This held great appeal.
"I, too, like my colleagues," Herman said. "I walked into the law school building today and thought, here are all these remarkable people I would not otherwise see each day, gathered together. We share so much history. When people ask what I think I will miss about teaching, my answer is simple: the people—faculty, the staff, and the students."