Lee Gelernt is a lawyer at the ACLU’s national office in New York. He is widely recognized as one of the country’s leading public interest lawyers and has argued dozens of major civil rights cases during his career, including in the U.S. Supreme Court and virtually every federal court of appeals in the country. He has also testified as a legal expert before both the House and Senate. In addition to his work at the ACLU, he is an adjunct professor at Columbia Law School, and for several years was a visiting professor at Yale Law School.
In recent years, Lee has argued some of the country’s highest-profile cases, including:
a successful national class-action challenge to the Trump administration’s unprecedented practice of separating thousands of immigrant families at the border. Lee’s work on this case received worldwide attention, including in the 2020 documentary “The Fight” and a July 2018 New York Times Magazine cover story about the ACLU. As the American Academy of Pediatricians said, the practice of separating parents from their children, hundreds of whom were babies and toddlers, amounted to child abuse.
the first case challenging the President Trump’s travel ban on individuals from certain Muslim-majority nations, which resulted in a federal court in Brooklyn issuing a nationwide Saturday night injunction against the ban only one day after the president enacted it; the argument was followed by millions of people, resulting in scores of protests.
a successful challenge to the “Title 42” policy” in which both the Trump and Biden administrations, over the objection of the CDC, barred families fleeing danger from seeking asylum protection at the border, on the pretextual ground that the policy was necessary to stop the spread of Covid-19.
Successful challenges to the Trump administration’s first and second asylum bans, which severely restricted access to asylum protection for those fleeing danger.
Among other cases he is currently litigating, Lee is lead counsel in a pending challenge to President Trump’s January 20, 2025, Proclamation declaring that asylum-seeking immigrants constitute an “invasion” of the United States and must be summarily expelled without hearings regardless of the danger they would face if sent back to their countries.
Over his career, Lee has argued dozens of other major civil rights cases. In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, he litigated several high-profile national security cases and served as one of only a few human rights observers at Guantanamo Bay for the first military trial conducted by the U.S. since World War II. One of the cases Lee argued was Ashcroft v. al-Kidd in the U.S. Supreme Court, involving the government’s post 9-11 policy of using the federal material witness statute to investigate and preventively detain terrorism suspects in cases where was no probable cause to justify a criminal arrest. He also successfully argued one the very first major September 11 cases to reach the federal courts of appeals, Detroit Free Press v. Ashcroft, where he represented the media in their lawsuit seeking to prevent the government from holding secret deportation hearings after September 11. In its decision invalidating the government’s secret hearing policy, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals stated that “democracies die behind closed doors” — a phrase that became one of the most cited and well-known admonitions issued by the judiciary in the aftermath of September 11.
Lee has won numerous awards for his work and has been recognized as one of the 500 leading lawyers in the country in any field. He lectures around the country and regularly appears in the national and international media, documentaries, podcasts, books and television shows, including: New York Times; Washington Post; Wall Street Journal; NPR; CNN, MSNBC; NBC’s Nightly News and Today Show, ABC’s World News Tonight , Nightline, and Good Morning America, CBS’s 60 Minutes, Evening News and This Morning; PBS’s The News Hour and Frontline, BBC radio and television, VICE, The Circus, The Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, and numerous other media outlets, documentaries, books and podcasts.
Lee graduated from Columbia Law School, where he was a Notes & Comments editor of the Law Review and is a former law clerk to the late Judge Frank Coffin of the First Circuit Court of Appeals. Prior to Law School, he received a M.Sc. from the London School of Economics, and a B.A. from Tufts University where he was member of the varsity basketball team.