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STAFF
Robert Rubin, Legal Director
Robert Rubin, a civil rights attorney for the past 28 years, is the Legal Director for the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area. He specializes in the areas of immigration and voting rights. Prior to coming to the Lawyers' Committee, he was the ACLU staff counsel in Jackson, Mississippi.
In the area of immigrant and refugee rights, he has successfully litigated more than 20 class actions. Mr. Rubin was co-lead counsel in the Prop. 187 class action that successfully challenged the threatened expulsion of undocumented children from California schools. He was co-counsel in the litigation that forced the Clinton Administration to release hundreds of Haitian asylum seekers from detention at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
In the first suit in the country involving an individual's challenge to post-9/11 detention, Mr. Rubin represented an Egyptian national subject to brutal body cavity searches and denied access to his attorney and US citizen spouse. This case was profiled on CBS' 60 Minutes. On behalf of a Pakistani immigrant, Mr. Rubin also secured the first damage award in the country post-9/11 for a passenger racially profiled and unlawfully removed from an airline flight.
Mr. Rubin also directs the Committee's voting rights project and secured the first injunction in the nation ordering a state to comply with the federal "motor voter" law. In two matters decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, he was counsel to Latino voters in Monterey County who were opposed to at-large elections. The Supreme Court held that the at-large system violated the interests of Latino voters and in a second ruling, rejected the State's argument that the at-large system was immune from review under the federal Voting Rights Act. Finally, Mr. Rubin successfully defended the constitutionality of the California Voting Rights Act in an action that also reached the U.S. Supreme Court in October 2007. This state law eases the burden of minority voting groups to challenge at-large election systems that dilute their vote.
Mr. Rubin has appeared on numerous occasions before the California Legislature and the U.S. Congress where he has testified regarding voting rights, state legislative redistricting plans and Congressional proposals to reform the political asylum system. In 1992, Mr. Rubin served on then President-elect Clinton's Transition Team.
He has lectured extensively (including adjunct positions at Stanford Law School and University of California School of Law, Boalt Hall) and most recently, as adjunct professor at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law where he taught a constitutional law seminar.
