Education
- BA, Brandeis University, Waltham, United States, 1999
- JD, Yale Law School, United States, 2002
Biography
Matthew Segal is a civil rights litigator, strategist, and teacher whose cases have overturned tens of thousands of criminal dispositions.
Segal is Co-Director of the American Civil Liberties Union's State Supreme Court Initiative (SSCI), which he helped to launch in 2023. The SSCI is a team of attorneys litigating a wide range of civil rights and civil liberties issues—particularly those involving novel state constitutional claims—in state courts around the country. Before joining the national ACLU, Segal served for 11 years as Legal Director of the ACLU of Massachusetts and for four years as an Assistant Federal Defender in North Carolina.
Segal's advocacy has focused on impact litigation. He has argued cases that secured the release of more than 5,000 people from state prisons and jails during the COVID pandemic; temporarily halted President Trump's first travel ban; recognized state constitutional protection for cell phone location data; and dismissed more than 61,000 wrongful drug charges in the Sonja Farak and Annie Dookhan lab scandals, which included the single largest dismissal of wrongful convictions in U.S. history.
In addition to teaching at Tufts, Segal has served as a Visiting Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School, where he has co-taught a seminar entitled�Litigating State Constitutional Rights, and as an Adjunct Instructor at Northeastern University School of Law, where he taught criminal procedure. Segal is a graduate of Brandeis University and Yale Law School, an elected member of the American Law Institute, and a former clerk to Judge Raymond Fisher of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Segal has been quoted on civil rights and civil liberties issues by various national media outlets. His written commentary has appeared in publications such as the Boston Globe, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Tablet Magazine, The Guardian (U.S.), Newsweek, Just Security, Slate, the Harvard Law & Policy Review, and the UCLA Law Review.
Segal is Co-Director of the American Civil Liberties Union's State Supreme Court Initiative (SSCI), which he helped to launch in 2023. The SSCI is a team of attorneys litigating a wide range of civil rights and civil liberties issues—particularly those involving novel state constitutional claims—in state courts around the country. Before joining the national ACLU, Segal served for 11 years as Legal Director of the ACLU of Massachusetts and for four years as an Assistant Federal Defender in North Carolina.
Segal's advocacy has focused on impact litigation. He has argued cases that secured the release of more than 5,000 people from state prisons and jails during the COVID pandemic; temporarily halted President Trump's first travel ban; recognized state constitutional protection for cell phone location data; and dismissed more than 61,000 wrongful drug charges in the Sonja Farak and Annie Dookhan lab scandals, which included the single largest dismissal of wrongful convictions in U.S. history.
In addition to teaching at Tufts, Segal has served as a Visiting Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School, where he has co-taught a seminar entitled�Litigating State Constitutional Rights, and as an Adjunct Instructor at Northeastern University School of Law, where he taught criminal procedure. Segal is a graduate of Brandeis University and Yale Law School, an elected member of the American Law Institute, and a former clerk to Judge Raymond Fisher of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Segal has been quoted on civil rights and civil liberties issues by various national media outlets. His written commentary has appeared in publications such as the Boston Globe, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Tablet Magazine, The Guardian (U.S.), Newsweek, Just Security, Slate, the Harvard Law & Policy Review, and the UCLA Law Review.