News & Commentary written by Matthew Segal

Matt is a co-director of the ACLU’s State Supreme Court Initiative, which he helped to launch in May 2023. At the SSCI, Matt has successfully briefed state supreme court cases on a range of issues, including prosecutorial accountability and access to justice. Matt previously served for 11 years as Legal Director of the ACLU of Massachusetts, where he 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 was the single largest dismissal of wrongful convictions in U.S. history.
Before coming to the ACLU, Matt spent four years as an assistant federal defender in North Carolina, where he argued cases in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, including a case that resulted in the reversal of numerous wrongful convictions and sentences. Matt is a graduate of Brandeis University and Yale Law School, a 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.