Judith Brown Chomsky has enjoyed fifty years of activism, which began with her participation in demonstrations in the 1950’s for the right of African-Americans to use non-segregated lunch counters, to legal work on behalf of victims of torture at Abu Ghraib prison. The course of her career in public life has grown out of consistent belief in the right of all people to have control over their own lives, and have the opportunity to live it with dignity.

Judith was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and today lives with her husband of more than forty years in a house only 11-miles from her first home. Despite these deep roots in her local community, Judith’s work has brought her into contact with people’s struggles in many parts off the world. With the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York she has brought legal suits against major oil companies and munitions manufacturers on behalf of villagers from Burma, Nigeria and Gaza. She has sued human rights abusers from Bosnia and East Timor. She has been privileged to serve as an election observer in the first democratic election in South Africa and in the 1984 election in El Salvador. In each, Judith has been inspired by the courage and fortitude with which ordinary people face inhuman conditions. She has had the honor of working with human rights workers in many parts of the world, whose work put them at great personal risk.

Judith was the suburban mother of two and a graduate student in anthropology when she answered the Call of Martin Luther King Jr to join a project to organize grassroots opposition to the Viet Nam war. The choice to participate was life-transforming. She left graduate school and spent the next several years as an organizer with the Philadelphia Resistance, primarily with anti war GI’s (active duty in the military) and with Viet Nam veterans. As the US participation in the war wound down, Judith decided that her family circumstances did not permit her to work as an organizer. She decided to go to law school so that she could participate in the same struggles with new skills better suited to her personal life. She was rewarded by a wonderful surprise, the fact that she loved the practice of law.

With friends from law school, Judith was a co-founder of the Juvenile Law Center of Philadelphia. After a few years, she had the opportunity to represent migrant farm laborers and to begin the Workers Rights Law Project to serve workers who were trying to organize within their labor organization to create more democratic and active unions. She was contacted by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) which was looking for a lawyer who could go to Gaza and the Occupied West Bank to help prepare a case involving civilian deaths from the Israeli occupation. This began her current work life as a cooperating attorney with the CCR, where she works on cases in their international human rights docket. These cases are intellectually challenging and combine many passions – professional law, cutting-edge law, commitment to human rights and the opportunity to share her work with dedicated likeminded colleagues in the United State and throughout the world.

The greatest reward of her life of activism has been the people she’s been privileged to meet and the accumulation of lasting friendships which go back even to the demonstrations of her childhood and continue to grow as they work, in many different ways, for their shared dreams.