Marjorie Heins is an activist, writer, and founder of the Free Expression Policy Project (http://fepproject.org/), a U.S. based organization dedicated to exploring challenges to free expression from censorship, media regulation, and intellectual property laws. She began the project in 2000 while at the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC).
Heins founded and directed the Arts Censorship Project at the American Civil Liberties Union from 1991-1998, during the years in which arts censorship were a particularly controversial and active field. During that time, she worked on a number of high-profile arts censorship matters. Heins was co-counsel on the ACLU's Reno v. ACLU brief to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ultimately led to striking the Communications Decency Act as an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment. Heins also worked on Karen Finley's lawsuit against the National Endowment for the Arts.[1]
In the 1980s as staff counsel at the Massachusetts chapter of the ACLU, she litigated numerous civil rights matters, including LGBT rights and free speech. One matter involved a litigation against Boston University for the discharge of the Dean of Students on the basis of her complaints about discrimination on the part of the university.[2] This story is told in Cutting the Mustard (1988).
Heins was chief of the Civil Rights Division of the Office of the Attorney General of Massachusetts and visiting professor at Boston College Law School. She was a journalist in the 1970s in San Francisco, and an anti-war activist during the Vietnam War.
Heins was admitted to the New York bar in 1993 and the Massachusetts bar in 1978. She received her J.D. (magna cum laude) from Harvard Law School in 1978, and a B.A., with distinction, from Cornell University in 1967. She is currently an adjunct professor at New York University.
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