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Robert Rubin has been a civil rights attorney for the past 36 years. He recently retired as legal director at the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights in San Francisco and now has his own practice focusing primarily on voting issues.
"The right to vote is perhaps the most important of our constitutional rights: without it, much change (legislative, executive, even judicial) would not be possible," according to a news release.
"In recent years we have seen legislative and judicial battles over allegedly burdensome ID requirements that restrict voter access. The Supreme Court decided that certain voter protections are no longer necessary because racism has largely been eradicated."
Rubin will present the issues viewed from both sides of these battles.
From 1979-81, he was the sole ACLU staff counsel in Jackson, Mississippi where he enjoyed the "privilege" of practicing before a federal judge who had been named Man of the Year by the Ku Klux Klan.
In the first 15 years of his career Rubin's focus was primarily immigrant and refugee rights, when he successfully litigated more than 20 class action suits. One such matter involved the 1994 voters’ initiative Prop. 187 that would have removed undocumented immigrants from public schools statewide. It never went into effect, after Rubin secured a temporary restraining order the morning after the vote.
He also was co-counsel in the litigation that forced the Clinton Administration to release hundreds of Haitian asylum seekers from detention at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The RMA has a free program every Wednesday that is open to the public -- to both men and women. No reservations are required.
The presentation begins promptly at 11 a.m., First Presbyterian Church, 1 West Putnam in Greenwich. It follows the social break after the RMA's meeting. For more information, visit the group's website or email info@gree.
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