Udi Ofer

Background

About Udi Ofer

Udi Ofer is the John L. Weinberg/Goldman Sachs and Co. Visiting Professor and Lecturer of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. He is the founding Director of the Policy Advocacy Clinic at Princeton University, a highly intensive year-long course that immerses students in the policy advocacy process with a focus on constitutional rights and human rights. His primary research areas include studying the problem of mass incarceration and devising bipartisan solutions to safely reduce incarceration rates while advancing equity, as well as studying effective human rights advocacy strategies. He teaches courses on civil rights, policing, criminal justice reform and policy advocacy, as well as a summer course for Princeton in Geneva, Switzerland on human rights advocacy. He is an elected member of the Council on Criminal Justice. He is also Chair of the International Advisory Council of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and often lectures and writes about civil rights issues in Israel.Ofer has more than 20 years of experience as a civil rights lawyer working on issues related to criminal justice reform, national security, free speech and racial justice. For two decades, Ofer worked as an attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), where he helped to transform the organization, expanding its work into new issue areas and tactics. He was the founding director of the Justice Division of the ACLU and served as the Deputy National Political Director of the ACLU. Ofer's work has led to passage of hundreds of laws and policies across the nation to reform the criminal justice system. His work and research have been cited by the New Jersey Supreme Court and the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and Tenth Circuit.