Marjorie Heins

Marjorie Heins (born 1946 ) is a First Amendment lawyer, writer and founder of the Free Expression Policy Project.

Education Heins received a B.A., with distinction, from Cornell University in 1967.

Career Heins started as a journalist in the 1970s in San Francisco with publications including the underground San Francisco Express Times. She was also an anti-war activist during the Vietnam War.

American Civil Liberties Union In the 1980s as staff counsel at the Massachusetts chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Heins litigated numerous civil rights matters, including LGBT rights and free speech. One matter involved a litigation against Boston University for the discharge of the dean of students on the basis of her complaints about discrimination on the part of the university. This story is told in Cutting the Mustard (1988). Heins also investigated the Boston Police Department's treatment of the notorious Carol Stuart murder case, in which a white man murdered his wife but claimed to be a victim of a carjacking by an African American man.

She founded and directed the Arts Censorship Project at the American Civil Liberties Union from 1991 to 1998,

Academics Heins has taught at Boston College Law School, Florida State University College of Law, the University of California-San Diego (UCSD), New York University (NYU), Tufts University, and the American University of Paris. In 2011, she was a fellow at NYU's Frederic Ewen Academic Freedom Center while researching her book, Priests of Our Democracy: The Supreme Court, Academic Freedom, and the Anti-Communist Purge. She is also a docent in the Impressionism/Post-Impressionism collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Cases Litigated Heins' litigation includes:

Urofsky v. Gilmore, 216 F.3d 401 (4th Cir. 2000) (argued for professors challenging constitutionality of Virginia law restricting access to sexually explicit material on work computers) National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley, 524 U.S. 569 (1998) (ACLU co-counsel for artists challenging NEA funding criteria as impermissibly viewpoint-based and vague) Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, 521 U.S. 844 (1997) (ACLU co-counsel for coalition challenging Communications Decency Act, which restricted "indecent" speech on the Internet)