Sunday Night Special: BORDC with Shahid Buttar, Exec. Dir.

Shahid Buttar, executive director, leads the Bill of Rights Defense Committee and the People’s Campaign for the Constitution (PCC) in our efforts to defend civil liberties, constitutional rights, and rule of law principles threatened within the United States by law enforcement and intelligence agencies. He is a constitutional lawyer, grassroots organizer, independent columnist, musician, and poet.

Before joining BORDC in 2009, Shahid directed a national program to combat racial and religious profiling, after serving for three years as associate director of the American Constitution Society for Law & Policy. He previously pursued public interest litigation (advancing marriage equality for same sex couples and campaign finance reform) in private practice at Heller Ehrman LLP, after receiving his J.D. from Stanford Law School in 2003, where he served as executive editor of the Stanford Environmental Law Journal and a teaching assistant for Constitutional Law. He graduated summa cum laude from Loyola University Chicago with a BA in political science and creative writing in 2000, ten years after beginning college at the University of Chicago and after a six-year career in financial services to pay for school.

Shahid’s comments have been featured by news outlets including The Washington Post, The New York Times, USA Today, CNN, al-Jazeera, FOX News, Agence-France Presse, Huffington Post, Truthout, Democracy Now!, and many others, including dozens of radio stations around the country. He frequently addresses public audiences, such as elected bodies, colleges, and law schools, including Stanford, UC-Berkeley, UCLA, the University of Chicago, Carnegie Mellon, and Georgetown.