This speech was given at The Future of Freedom Foundation’s June 2007 conference, “Restoring the Republic: Foreign Policy & Civil Liberties” held in Reston, Virginia.
Joseph Margulies is an attorney with the MacArthur Justice Center and an Associate Clinical Professor at Northwestern University Law School in Chicago. He received his B.A., with distinction, from Cornell University in 1982, and his J.D., cum laude, from Northwestern University in 1988.
After a clerkship with the Hon. William Hart of the Northern District of Illinois, Margulies joined the staff of the Texas Capital Resource Center, where he represented men and women on Texas’ death row. In 1994, Margulies entered private practice in Minneapolis, specializing in civil rights and capital defense. In 2002, he was the Distinguished Practitioner in Residence at Cornell University Law School, and in 2004, he joined the MacArthur Center. Margulies was lead counsel in Rasul v. Bush, involving the detentions at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Station, and in Habib v. Bush, involving the rendition of Mamdouh Habib from Pakistan to Egypt. In June 2005, at the invitation of Pennsylvania Republican Senator Arlen Specter, Margulies testified at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on detainee issues. He writes and lectures widely on civil liberties in the wake of September 11 and plays a leading role in coordinating the litigation nationwide challenging the Bush Administration’s post-9/11 detention policy. He is also the author of Guantánamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power (Simon and Schuster 2006), and has won numerous awards for his work since 9/11.
