Biography
Lynn Hecht Schafran is an internationally recognized attorney specializing in gender discrimination law and Director since 1981 of the National Judicial Education Program to Promote Equality for Women and Men in the Courts (NJEP), a project of Legal Momentum (formerly NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund) in cooperation with the National Association of Women Judges. A graduate of Smith College and the Columbia University School of Law, she was law clerk to Federal District Court Judge Edmund L. Palmieri in the Southern District of New York and litigated with the New York based law firm of Weil, Gotshal & Manges.
Ms. Schafran has designed and presented courses for numerous national, state and federal judicial colleges in the United States and Canada and created several model judicial education curricula, videos and DVDs including Understanding Sexual Violence: The Judicial Response to Stranger and Nonstranger Rape and Sexual Assault and When Bias Compounds: Ensuring Equal Justice for Women of Color in the Courts. She was advisor to the state supreme court and federal circuit task forces on gender bias in the courts throughout the country which emerged in response to the work of the National Judicial Education Program. She is widely published on the subject of gender bias in the courts, the law, and the legal profession. Her publications include Judges Tell: What I Wish I Had Known Before I Presided in an Adult Victim Sexual Assault Case, Domestic Violence, Developing Brains, and the Lifespan: New Knowledge from Neuroscience,, and Gender, Justice & Law: From Asylum to Zygotes— Issues and Resources for Judicial, Legal and Continuing Legal Education, a 500-page guide to sixty-two substantive and procedural areas of the law, as well as aspects of law teaching and law practice, in which gender bias may be a factor.
Ms. Schafran is co-author of a web course. Intimate Partner Sexual Abuse: Adjudicating this Hidden Dimension of Domestic Violence Cases, available free at www.njep-ipsacourse.org, and author of several; on-line curricula on topics related to adult victim sexual abuse such as Elder Victims of Sexual Abuse, Women in Drug Courts Sexual Assault as the Underlying Trauma and Medical Forensic Sexual Assault Examinations: What Are They and What Can They Tell the Courts. All of NJEP's resources are available at www.njep.org.
Ms. Schafran was an original member of and then special advisor to the American Bar Association (ABA) Commission on Women in the Profession for which she now serves as Legal Momentum’s liaison and as a member of the editorial board of Perspectives, the Commission’s magazine. She served for six years on the ABA Standing Committee on Amicus Briefs and serves on the ABA Human Rights Advisory Council. Ms. Schafran was a presidential appointee to the Defense Department Advisory Committee on Women in the Services (DACOWITS) and served as Vice Chair and Special Counsel to the New York City Commission on the Status of Women. She chaired the Committee on Sex and Law of the New York City Bar Association where she now co-chairs the annual Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Distinguished Lecture on Women and the Law. She is a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation and a member of the American Law Institute.
Ms. Schafran has received numerous awards in recognition of her work to eliminate bias in the courts, among them the first Distinguished Service Award of the National Association of Women Judges, the Smith College Medal, and the Columbia Law School Public Interest Achievement Award. From the American Bar Association she received the Commission on Women in the Profession’s Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Award and from the Commission on Domestic and Sexual Violence its Sharon Corbitt Award. She was the first woman to receive the Francis Rawle Award, given by the American Law Institute - American Bar Association Committee on Continuing Professional Education for outstanding achievement in post-admission legal education. She holds an honorary degree from the Quinnapiace College of Law and most recently was honored by the law firm at which she began her career with the Weil Alumnus Luminary Award as one of the firm’s most distinguished alumni.
Related Articles:
Lynn Hecht Schafran, A.B.A.: Previous Margaret Brent Women Law. Achievement Award Recipients, https://perma.cc/DEC4-BYZU.
