Constitution Day 2011 with Jerry Nadler and Prof. Burt Neuborne

U.S. Representative Jerry Nadler represents the Eighth Congressional District of New York, which includes much of the West Side of Manhattan (including NYU), the Financial District, as well as a number of diverse neighborhoods in southwestern Brooklyn. He began his political career in 1976 in the New York State Assembly, where he served for 16 years. In 1992, following the death of Congressman Ted Weiss, Nadler was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in a special election and has served in Congress ever since. He was re-elected to his 10th full term in 2010.

Professor Burt Neuborne is the Inez Milholland Professor of Civil Liberties and founding Legal Director of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School. For 45 years, he has been one of the nation's foremost civil liberties lawyers, serving as National Legal Director of the ACLU from 1981 to 1986, Special Counsel to the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund from 1990 to 1996, and was a member of the New York City Human Rights Commission from 1988 to 1992. He has argued numerous Supreme Court cases and has litigated hundreds of important constitutional cases in the state and federal courts. He challenged the constitutionality of the Vietnam War, pioneered the flag burning cases, worked on the Pentagon Papers case, worked with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg when she headed the ACLU Women's Rights Project, anchored the ACLU's legal program during the Reagan years, and defended the Legal Services program against unconstitutional attacks.

In 1996, Neuborne appeared as Jerry Falwell's lawyer in Milos Forman's The People v. Larry Flynt. For the past 14 years, he has served as a principal counsel in a series of lawsuits seeking to recover property unjustly taken from Holocaust victims by Swiss banks and German corporations during the Nazi era. The litigation has succeeded in assembling more than $8.5 billion for distribution to Holocaust victims and their families throughout the world. Neuborne was appointed by the Court to oversee the $1.25 billion Swiss bank settlement, and was appointed by the United States to serve on the Board of Trustees of the German Foundation "Remembrance, Responsibility and Future," established to distribute the $5.2 billion settlement in the German slave labor litigation.