Next Wednesday, April 14...our NYS Attorney General candidate series rolls on one of w/DL21C's longtime supporters, State Senator Eric Schneiderman!
Senator Schneiderman is one of the distinguished candidates seeking to become our state's "people's lawyer" in the event that Andrew Cuomo does not run for re-election.
Senator Schneiderman has been at the forefront of the debate on reforming Albany and a leading voice in bringing about progressive change in NY.
Event begins at 7pm sharp
Free for Annual members; $7/nonmembers
Make sure to RSVP here or at www.dl21c.org
Visit www.dl21c.org to become an Annual Member and check out our upcoming events!
See you Wednesday night!
About Senator Schneiderman:
Eric Schneiderman grew up on Manhattan's Upper West Side where he attended Trinity School, and began his community activism as a 15-year-old volunteer at the Goddard Riverside Community Center.
After graduating from Amherst College, Eric served for two years as a Deputy Sheriff in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, where he started the first comprehensive drug and alcohol treatment program at the Berkshire House of Corrections. He attended Harvard Law School, and then clerked for two years in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. He later entered private practice and became a partner at the firm of Kirkpatrick and Lockhart.
While in private practice, Eric served as counsel to a long list of advocacy and public interest organizations. For over 10 years he was counsel to the West Side Crime Prevention Program, using innovative legal tools to evict drug dealers and clean up crack dens. As a founder of the Attorney General's Anti-Crime Advocates program and a member of the board of the Lawyer's Committee on Violence, Eric recruited and trained private attorneys to represent community groups striving to protect their neighborhoods from crime.
In 1993, he became President of the Board of the Public Policy and Education Fund, which led the successful campaign for a managed care patients' bill of rights in New York State. He served as a legal advisor to the Clean Money, Clean Elections campaign for public financing of elections in 1998, and acted as lead attorney for the NYPIRG Straphangers campaign in a series of historic lawsuits against the MTA.
Eric was elected to the New York State Senate in 1998, where he has served on a variety of committees, including Environmental Conservation, Health and Higher Education. He has been recognized for his work on legislation protecting freedom of choice, fair funding for public schools, ethics reform, and the expansion of affordable healthcare for all New Yorkers. Eric has been a leading advocate for rational and effective gun laws, and serves as national co-chair of Legislators Against Illegal Guns.
When the Democrats took control of the Senate in January 2009, Eric became Chair of the Senate Codes Committee as well as Deputy Majority Leader for Policy. And just months after taking back the Senate, Eric shepherded through sweeping reforms to the notorious Rockefeller Drug laws. These reforms included an unprecedented expansion of drug treatment as an alternative to prison, gave judges more discretion to divert non-violent drug-addicts to treatment, and increased penalties for drug kingpins.
Eric lives on Manhattan's Upper West Side with his seventeen-year-old daughter Catherine.