Lee Goldstein

goldstein-4

Lee Goldstein (Norma Terrin)

62 Elm St, Jamaica Plain, MA 02130

(617) 492-8473 (private office)

(617) 384-5594 (law school)

(617) 524-7028 (evening0

lee.goldsteinandfeuer@gmail.com

goldste@law.harvard.edu

Vanderbilt University (B.A.), Northwestern Law School (J.D.), U. Penn/ Howard U. (Reginald Heber Smith Community Lawyer Fellowship); Harvard Law School ( LL.M.)



June 2018 - Update

Update:  Still  happily married  and living in Jamaica Plain with my partner of 33 years, Norma Terrin, who is  still working as a bio-statistician at Tufts Medical School.   As before, I’m dividing my time between the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau and my private office.  At school, much of my work has shifted to  the anti-gentrification struggle.  After 43 years, my private office “downsized” to a smaller space with less staff so that we could do more free work- Black Lives Matter, 350.org, XL Pipeline, Poor People’s Campaign- with less overhead.  Since the 50th reunion, my daughter graduated from college and is currently living at home.

I look forward to getting reacquainted and renewing past friendships.

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In addition to my “day job” as a lawyer and teacher, I “did my time” as a social theorist, civil rights activist, musician, actor, playwright, columnist for a weekly, and “60’s radical.” (I even had a pony tail!)  I was an active participant in the noteworthy American historical moments of the late 20thy century. I co-parented two children (one 37, the other 18), had one child who was severely brain damaged and died at age 9, was divorced and remarried. My wife, Norma, is a bio-statistician who is a medical school professor at Tufts. I spend part of the summer in Maine and I learned how to cross country ski at age 42.  I practice Iyengar Yoga each day and don’t have enough hair for a pony tail. Like many of my contemporaries, I cared for my parents at the end of their lives.  Norma and I will soon be “empty-nesters” when our daughter will start college in September.  

Here’s an excerpt from my “Short Bio”:

Throughout my legal career, I have divided my time between teaching and practice, practice and theory.  As a committed political person, I have attempted to blur the boundaries between progressive activist , teacher, scholar and lawyer. Starting in 1971 as a clinical teacher in Chicago while a Reginald Heber Smith Fellow at the Northwestern Legal Assistance Clinic, I represented tenants, alternate institutions as well as prisoners, gangs, community groups and members of the Black Panther Party.  Upon moving to Boston in 1972, I was a staff attorney at Project Place Legal Services, a community group in the South End where I represented poor people as well as advised progressive community organizations, with particular concentration in the area of mental health, housing law and patients rights.  While at Project Place, my book Communes, Law and Common Sense was published in 1974.  In the mid-1970's, I was the Regional Vice President of the National Lawyers Guild and was the Chairperson of the Massachusetts Chapter for two terms.  In 1977, I was a member of the first delegation of Western lawyers who were invited to study the Chinese Legal System and consequently wrote and lectured about socialist theory and legality.  I was selected the Massachusetts Chapter’s “Lawyer of the Year” in 1998   From 1975 to date, I have practiced law as part of the community law office of Goldstein and Feuer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, representing tenants, workers, community and political groups.  Much of my past legal work has been in pursuing privacy and discrimination claims on behalf of members of Local 26 of the Restaurant Workers Union. As lead counsel in an action filed by Hotel Workers against their employer, I won a large settlement for the invasion of the privacy of male workers at the Boston Sheraton who were secretly videotaped in their locker room.  Another part of my activity has been as a lawyer for persons engaged in acts of civil resistance, including Massachusetts offshoots of the Occupy Wall Street movement, pertaining to issues of disarmament, peace and justice and I have successfully incorporated international law defenses in many of such cases.  Within the anti-foreclosure movement, I have had a long association with City Life/Vida Urbana, coordinating the legal defense of those arrested in eviction blockings.

        Not only have I practiced law, but I have shared my enthusiasm and commitment with students.  I was the Director of the Legal Studies Program at the Goddard-Cambridge Graduate School in the mid and late 1970's where I taught community activists how to conjoin an awareness of legal tactics into their political goals.   After teaching legal theory at U. Mass- Amherst, Jurisprudence at Northeastern Law School, and completing my LL.M. at Harvard, since 1979,  I have been a Supervising Attorney and Clinical Instructor at the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, assisting second and third year law students in their representation of poor people in benefits, housing and family law. I have also been a teaching member of Harvard Law School’s Trial Advocacy Workshop and have recently assisted Legal Aid Bureau students in the formation of a Wage and Hour Practice Group. In 2008, with the assistance of law students, I drafted anti-predatory lending legislation which protects tenants after foreclosure.  The bill was signed into law by the Governor in August, 2010.  As part of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau’s Foreclosure Task Force, I am also currently advising cities and towns about taking “underwater” mortgages by utilizing their eminent domain power.  In May, 2013, my LL.M. Thesis, “High Theory and Low Practice: High Theory and Low Practice: A Dream and Five Theses On Being a Left Lawyer And Legal Worker will be published in the on-line legal journal Unbound.

Seneca High School—Class of '63                     http://www.senecaclassof63.com