• Staff attorney for the National Prison Project
• Founder of Co/Motion and the Student Action Campaign
• Founder of Alliance for Justice 

The President of Alliance for Justice (AFJ), Nan Aron is a lawyer who began her professional career as a trial attorney for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, litigating cases against companies accused of racial and sexual discrimination. In 1979 she left litigation to establish AFJ. Six years later she launched AFJ’s Judicial Selection Project, which systematically opposes Republican judicial appointments because it considers their political views too conservative. 

Aron’s first major victory with AFJ occurred when she helped scuttle President Reagan’s 1987 nomination of Judge Robert Bork for the U.S. Supreme Court. The day after the Bork nomination had been announced, Aron and AFJ representatives held closed-door strategy meetings with Democratic Senators on the Judiciary Committee. “We’re in triple gear,” said Aron, exhorting the American Bar Association to label Bork an extremist figure of the radical right who was unqualified to sit on the Court. Since then, Aron and AFJ have consistently opposed Republican appointments to the federal judiciary, including most recently John Roberts and Samuel Alito. This pattern stands in contradiction to Aron’s 1999 assertion, made during the Clinton administration, that the President of the United States “has a duty to fill judicial vacancies and appoint jurists who share his views.”

In 1994 Aron founded the Student Action Campaign (SAC, formerly called First Monday) to train college students for careers as inside-the-Beltway political operatives. Held annually on the first day of each Supreme Court session, this Campaign brings together law professors, students, and left-leaning celebrities to produce documentaries that are shown on college campuses for the purpose of recruiting students as leftist activists. In 2002, for example, SAC presented a documentary titled The Threat to America’s Freedoms, which focused on alleged civil liberties violations related to the war on terror; the film featured such luminaries as actress Susan Sarandon and radical historian Howard Zinn.

In 2000, Aron established Co-Motion, an anti-gun-ownership initiative consisting of two-day training seminars designed to teach young activists how to campaign effectively against the Second Amendment. Co-Motion events have been held at hundreds of American high schools and colleges.

Aron received a B.A. from Oberlin College and a J.D. from Case Western Reserve University. She has taught at Georgetown and George Washington University Law Schools, and serves on the Dean’s Advisory Council at American University’s Washington College of Law. In 1989 she published the book Liberty and Justice for All: Public Interest Law in the 1980s and Beyond. She formerly served as a staff attorney for the National Prison Project, an ACLU-sponsored initiative that agitates through lawsuits on behalf of convicted felons.

Aron currently writes a blog that is featured on the Huffington Post Internet webzine.