By Kimberly Chin

Law Professor Eric Freedman has a long-standing interest in civil liberties, which can be attributed to his exposure to journalism through his father, who was a foreign editor of the New York Times. Since he was six year old he read the newspaper, which helped him get a sense of the society that he defends now, including his representation of detainees held at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

When Freedman was in college, he thought that he would have a career in journalism. He had done his fair share of reporting as a campus correspondent for the New York Times at Yale University. Post-graduation, he chose to wander off the path of journalism and went to Yale Law School, seeing that there were many things to accomplish in law. “Journalists wrote about things, but lawyers did things,” Freedman said.

Freedman devoted years to “freeing men” in his role in pro-bono or public interest litigation, involving advice and representation. In his legal career, he participated in collateral attacks on death penalty cases in Texas, Florida, Louisiana and Virginia; defended First Amendment rights such as representing a literary agent who refused to disclose his client’s projects; and fought for damages for prisoners who were illegally arrested and searched, as well as extensive work on civil rights for detainees held at Guantanamo Bay post-9/11.

“My work has to be meaningful to people in everyday life,” Freedman said. His most personally gratifying case, he said, was with Earl Washington Jr., who he had made a 15-year effort to keep the courts from sentencing to death row in Virginia. He won Washington’s freedom in 2001 after DNA testing acquitted him of his crime. He received the Dybwad Humanitarian Award of the American Association on Mental Retardation for his victory with Washington.

Despite his accomplishments, Freedman speaks humbly of his work. “The U.S. Constitution doesn’t belong to a small group of lawyers,” he said. “It absolutely depends on support and understanding of a huge mass of Americans who are ultimately determined of what happens in Washington.”

Freedman acknowledged that the Washington case shed light on the death penalty guidelines for defendants of capital punishment cases. He said judges and defense lawyers follow these guidelines, which takes a major role in shaping the case. “There is more to law than going to court and getting court decisions. Guidelines are also important as well,” Freedman said.

The lawyer worked with the firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in the New York and Washington branches before being hired as a member of the Hofstra Law School faculty in 1988. The University has extensively supported Freedman in availability and offering courses that he chose to teach such as Constitutional Law, the Constitution and Social Reform, Mass Media and the First Amendment and The Death Penalty in Contemporary America. “The institutional support of my different interests has drawn me to see that this is the best that can be offered,” he said.

Freedman is now an acclaimed professor on the Law School staff and was installed as the Maurice A. Deane Distinguished Professor of Constitutional Law in 2004.

Aside from teaching at the University, he is also a reporter for the American Bar Association’s Guidelines for Defense Representation in Capital Cases and also serves as a member of the American Law Institute and of the Executive Committee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York. He has recently published an empirical study of habeas corpus and the effects of habeas corpus after 1986.

Now that the Supreme Court has added the treatment of Guantanamo Bay detainees to its docket, Freedman is set to work on those cases, which are scheduled for December. He believes that these cases will have the “highest potential impact” of all the projects that he is currently working on at the moment.

Guantanamo detainees, who have been persecuted since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Freedman said, have petitioned the Supreme Court over unlawful detainment they say violates the writ of habeas corpus. The Court initially refused to undertake the petitions, but it recently changed its mind.

Freedman explained lawyers have won repeated cases in the Supreme Court regarding constitutional rights, but it hasn’t effectively altered the government. The most effective way requires mass political movement by people. “If everybody, especially lawyers, doesn’t have constitutional values in their hearts and act upon them, then the Constitution is finished,” he said.

“The most important thing in keeping the Constitution alive is to make sure it is brought to public attention and that people understand the constitutional values that come into play,” Freedman said.