Contributor

Robert L. Herbst

civil rights lawyer and contributing opinion writier

Bob Herbst is a human rights lawyer in New York who lives in Westchester with his wife Lynne, a psychoanalyst. Their daughter Allyson is a first year resident in internal medicine at Emory in Atlanta. He has been a contributing opinion writer at Huff Po since 2013. Bob is a graduate of Princeton University and its Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and of the Yale Law School. He served as a federal prosecutor in Chicago and Philadelphia and as Executive Assistant District Attorney in Brooklyn, New York, focusing on prosecution of major economic crime and public corruption. Since 1983, Bob has been in private practice as a civil rights, employment, criminal defense and class action trial and appellate lawyer, primarily representing victims of (1) police, corrections and other government misconduct; (2) employment and housing discrimination on grounds of race, ethnicity, religion, gender, disability and age; (3) sexual harassment; and (4) retaliation for whistleblowing. From 2011 to 2013, Bob served as Independent Counsel to the Special Court for Sierra Leone, where he investigated, prosecuted and convicted four men for contempt and obstruction of justice before that international criminal tribunal. Since 2014, Bob has served as Coordinator of the Westchester New York Chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace. He has been an active private pilot for more than 35 years.