Barbara Handschu

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Barbara Ellen Handschu (b. 1942) is a Jewish-American political activist and lawyer whose surname was memorialized on a set of federal guidelines "[ordering] restrictions on police surveillance ... signed by the city [of New York] in 1985".

She graduated from the University of Michigan Law School, but began her career as a law secretary to Justice Hilda Schwartz until her 1969 arrest at a squatters' demonstration in Manhattan caused her to switch careers to criminal defense lawyer.

Judge Charles S. Haight, III (misidentified in the New York Times as "Charles S. Haight, Jr."), the federal judge who signed off on the guidelines in 1985 "relaxed them, ostensibly to assist antiterrorism detection" in 2003. In 2005, coincidentally the same year Handschu herself appeared at an anti-Iraq War protest, Judge Haight ordered the NYPD "in a 51-page order ... to change its surveillance practices at events where people gather to exercise their First Amendment rights".

She was an activist lawyer, representing, among others, the Young Lords of Spanish Harlem (to one of whom, Robert Lemus, she was briefly married), the Black Panthers, the Chicago Seven and participants in the Attica Prison riots.

Never remarried and childless, she has long-been a resident of Buffalo, New York, where she has a strictly matrimonial and custody law practice; she no longer practices criminal law. She was the first female president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers.

[edit] References

Police Surveillance of Political Activity -- The History and Current State of the Handschu Decree. Testimony of Arthur N. Eisenberg Presented to the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. New York Civil Liberties Union (May 21, 2003).
New York Times, February 23, 2007, Metro Section, p. B2, "Making Police Obey the Rules That Bear Her Name".