Name Barbara Handschu | Role Lawyer | |
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Education University of Michigan, New York University | ||
Barbara Ellen Handschu (born June 28, 1942) is an American political activist and lawyer whose surname was memorialized on a set of federal guidelines "[ordering] restrictions on police surveillance ... signed by the city [of New York] in 1985", which became known as the Handschu decree.
Handschu graduated from New York University and the University of Michigan Law School, but began her career as a law secretary to Justice Hilda Schwartz until her 1969 arrest at a squatters' demonstration in Manhattan caused her to switch careers to criminal defense lawyer.
Judge Charles S. Haight, Jr., the federal judge who signed off on the guidelines in 1985 "relaxed them, ostensibly to assist antiterrorism detection" in 2003. In 2005, the same year Handschu herself appeared at an anti-Iraq War protest, Judge Haight ordered the NYPD "in a 51-page order ... to change its surveillance practices at events where people gather to exercise their First Amendment rights".
Personal life
She was an activist lawyer, representing, among others, the Young Lords of Spanish Harlem (to one of whom, Robert Lemus, she was briefly married), the Black Panthers, the Chicago Seven and participants in the Attica Prison riots.
She had been a resident of Buffalo, New York, and now is exclusively practising matrimonial and custody law in New York City; she no longer practices criminal law. She was the first female president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers.