Arthur Spitzer

Arthur Spitzer is the Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union of the National Capital Area. He is a native of New York City and a graduate of Cornell University (1971) and the Yale Law School (1974). He practiced for several years at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering (now Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP) before assuming his current position in 1980. He is a member of the American Law Institute and a Master at the Edward Coke Appellate Inn of Court.

While at the ACLU, Mr. Spitzer has represented such interesting clients as Louis Farrakhan (when he was barred from attending D.C. Mayor Marion Barry's criminal trial in 1990), the Ku Klux Klan (when it was denied a permit to march along Constitution Avenue), and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (when its design of a sad circus elephant was barred from the "Party Animals" display of donkeys and elephants on the District's sidewalks in 2002). He has worked on successful First Amendment challenges to the 1992 D.C. campaign contribution limit law, the 1996 Presidential Inaugural Committee's refusal to allow anti-abortion protesters to hold up their signs along the Inaugural Parade route, and the Capitol Police regulation that banned leafleting and other demonstration activities on the sidewalks at the foot of the East Front steps. He argued Ake v. Oklahoma in the Supreme Court, which held that indigent criminal defendants are entitled to necessary trial and pre-trial expert assistance at government expense. Among his current matters are a class action challenge to the DC police mass arrest of demonstrators during the World Bank-IMF protests in September 2002, and a challenge to D.C. Fire Department grooming regulations that require Muslim and Rastafarian firefighters to violate their religious beliefs by shaving and cutting their hair.

He is not related to New York Attorney General Elliot Spitzer. But he is glad that fewer people now have to ask him how to spell his name.