Harvey A. Silverglate

Harvey A. Silverglate (Princeton University ’64, Harvard Law School ’67), of counsel to the Boston law firm Zalkind, Rodriguez, Lunt & Duncan LLP, specializes in criminal defense, civil liberties, and academic freedom/student rights law. Silverglate’s law practice began on its current trajectory in 1969 when he represented student anti-war protestors charged with taking over Harvard’s University Hall, and has included drug prosecutions, draft and riot cases, bank and securities fraud, bribery and extortion, espionage, tax evasion, police misconduct, murder and manslaughter, habeas corpus proceedings, money laundering, and desertion (tried at a court martial).

Silverglate has combined his wide-ranging legal experience with a parallel writing career. For nearly four decades, he has been the criminal law and civil liberties columnist for The Boston Phoenix, an alternative weekly newspaper, and he formerly wrote a bi-monthly civil liberties column for The National Law Journal. His work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times Book Review, The Boston Globe, Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, Reason magazine, and elsewhere. He is also an adjunct scholar to the Cato Institute.

Silverglate’s first full-length book, co-authored with Alan Charles Kors, is The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses (The Free Press, October 1998). A year after publication, Silverglate and Kors founded the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, (FIRE), a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving and enlarging academic freedom, due process, and freedom of speech and conscience at American colleges and universities. He is currently FIRE’s chairman.

Silverglate’s recently-completed book, Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent (Encounter Books, September 2009), describes how vague federal statutes, combined with an erosion of intent as a requirement for a criminal act, have subjected all of civil society to potentially ruinous prosecution.

Silverglate lives with his wife, portrait photographer Elsa Dorfman, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Their son, Isaac, lives and works in New York City.