Who

Dyed-in-the-wool liberal and one-time Giuliani nemesis Donna Lieberman heads up the New York Civil Liberties Union, the state affiliate of the ACLU.

Backstory

Lieberman got her start in activism when she organized a civil rights event at her New Jersey high school. Her fondness for liberal politics hardly dissipated over the ensuing years: As a student at Harvard in the late '60s, she joined Students for a Democratic Society; and it was the Chicago Seven trial in 1968, she says, that convinced her to become a lawyer. After attending law school at Rutgers, Lieberman spent several years at the Legal Aid Society office in the South Bronx before teaching at City College for a decade. In 1988, she joined the New York Civil Liberties Union as associate director where she oversaw the group's reproductive rights project. She was made executive director in 2001, replacing Norman Siegel.

Of note

The NYCLU has been defending civil liberties—and tormenting the powers that be—since it was founded more than 50 years ago. During the '90s, the organization earned a rep as one of the most vocal critics of Rudy Giuliani's "quality of life" crackdown, which encouraged cops to arrest the homeless on minor charges in an effort to "clean up" the streets. Lieberman hasn't had any shortage of issues to contend with since taking over the group a few months before Sept. 11th and the end of Giuliani's second term. The NYCLU has challenged the constitutionality of various security measures around town (subway bag searches, surveillance cameras, restrictions on public protests), and has been active defending Muslim victims of discrimination. Perhaps most notably, the NYCLU filed dozens of lawsuits in connection with the arrest of protestors at the Republican National Convention in 2004, arguing that the NYPD indiscriminately arrested people and violated protestors' civil rights by detaining them (for days on some occasions) on Pier 57. (For his part, Ray Kelly has described it as the NYPD's "finest hour.") More recently, the NYCLU has been battling the idea of national identification cards, saying they would have "disastrous implications for all New Yorkers."

Personal

Lieberman, who describes herself as a "big-time soccer mom," lives on West 93rd Street with her partner, ACLU attorney Bill Stampur, and their two children.