Marjorie Heins
| Marjorie Heins | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born | 1946 |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | B.A., J.D. |
| Alma mater |
Cornell University Harvard Law School |
| Occupation | lawyer and writer |
| Organization | Free Expression Policy Project |
| Awards | Eli M. Oboler Award First Amendment Hero Luther McNair Award |
| Website | fepproject |
Marjorie Heins (b.1946) is a First Amendment lawyer, writer and founder of the Free Expression Policy Project.
Heins received a B.A., with distinction, from Cornell University in 1967. She received her J.D. (magna cum laude) from Harvard Law School in 1978. She was admitted to the bar of Massachusetts in 1978 and New York in 1993.
Heins started as a journalist in the 1970s in San Francisco on publications including the underground San Francisco Express Times. She was also an anti-war activist during the Vietnam War.
In the 1980s as staff counsel at the Massachusetts chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Heins litigated numerous civil rights matters, including LGBT rights and free speech. One matter involved a litigation against Boston University for the discharge of the Dean of Students on the basis of her complaints about discrimination on the part of the university. This story is told in Cutting the Mustard (1988). Heins also investigated the Boston Police Department's treatment of the notorious Carol Stuart murder case, in which a white man murdered his wife but claimed to be a victim of a carjacking by an African American man.
From 1989-91, she served as editor-in-chief of the Massachusetts Law Review. In 1991-92, she was chief of the Civil Rights Division at the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office.
She founded and directed the Arts Censorship Project at the American Civil Liberties Union from 1991-1998, during the years in which arts censorship were a particularly controversial and active field. During that time, she worked on a number of high-profile arts censorship matters. Heins was co-counsel on the ACLU's Reno v. ACLU brief to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ultimately led to striking the Communications Decency Act as an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment. Heins was also co-counsel on Karen Finley's landmark lawsuit against the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley.
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