Busy time for alumnus as head lawyer of ACLU in Massachusetts

Brandeis University News

By Brian KlotzMatthew Segal ’99 is the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts. That’s another way of saying that the Brandeis alumnus has been very busy lately.“We feel like we’re in the fight of our lives,” he says, referring to the swath of new challenges he and his colleagues have had to contend with under the current presidential administration.Earlier this year, in the wake of President Trump’s executive order to impose a travel ban on immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries, Segal argued Louhghalam vs. Trump, the Boston lawsuit that led to a temporary halt of the ban.Segal notes, however, that while the events since the presidential election have created significant battles for the ACLU, the organization is busy with many other issues that predate Nov 8. “Much of the work in social and racial justice occurs at the state level,” he says.One of Segal’s proudest accomplishments came in April, when Massachusetts overturned a record 21,839 wrongful convictions tainted by former Boston drug lab chemist Annie Dookhan. It was the culmination of advocacy Segal had been working on since he began at the ACLU of Massachusetts in 2012.Over the past several years, Segal has emerged as a leading voice for perspective on complex cases involving civil liberties. For example, The New York Times quoted him frequently in its coverage of the recent high-profile case of Michelle Carter, a Taunton teenager convicted of involuntary manslaughter for encouraging her boyfriend via text messaging to commit suicide.Segal’s passion for justice developed as an undergraduate at Brandeis, where his parents, Donald ’69 and Risa ’69, met and married – with the ceremony even taking place at the campus’ own Berlin Chapel.Segal remembers the impact of taking sociology courses with Professor Gordie Fellman, who also taught his mother. “He helped me to understand how structure in our ...

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