Brandt Goldstein, author of Storming the Court
Brandt Goldstein, author of Storming the Court
Presented by the Brown Bag Lunch Series:
October 31, 2005, 12:15 p.m., Room 3037
Storming the Court is the true story of the suit filed by Yale law students and human rights
lawyers to free innocent refugees held on Guantanamo by the American military in the early 1990s. After fleeing Haiti following a military coup, 300 men, women, and children who’d qualified
for asylum in the United States were forced into a Guantanamo detention camp because they had tested positive for HIV. Convinced the detentions were unlawful and immoral, a band of Yale students
led by Professor Harold Koh waged a legal war against two presidential administrations that maintained the Haitians had no rights under U.S. law. In a decision that resonates today more than ever,
a federal judge in New York ultimately ordered the refugees released, ruling that due process did not permit the U.S. government to detain them on Guantanamo indefinitely.
Brandt Goldstein is an attorney and writer whose articles have been published in The New
York Times Magazine, Slate, MSNBC.com, and elsewhere. After graduating from Yale Law School in 1992, he clerked for Judge Harry T. Edwards of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Brandt
then practiced law at a private firm in Washington for several years before beginning to write full-time. The co-founder of the online legal commentary journal Writ (for FindLaw.com), Brandt was a
research assistant at Yale Law School from 1999-2001, during which time he began work on Storming the Court.
The Brown Bag Lunch Series is sponsored by the Program in Public Law.