BARBARA OLSHANSKY is the Leah Kaplan Distinguished Professor in Human Rights at Stanford University. Previously, she was deputy legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and director counsel of the Guantánamo Global Justice Initiative there. She was one of the lead attorneys who brought the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case that resulted in a decision allowing the nearly 600 detainees held at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba to challenge their unlawful indefinite detentions. She’s the coauthor most recently of The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing George W. Bush from Office (St. Martins, 2006), among other titles, and author of Secret Trials and Executions: Military Tribunals and the Threat to Democracy (Open Media
Series/Seven Stories Press, 2002).

She came to CCR in September of 1995 from the Environmental Defense Fund, a national, not-for-profit environmental organization. Barbara's current docket at the Center includes class action lawsuits concerning immigrants' rights, race discrimination in employment and education, environmental justice and public health, prisoners' rights, and Native American rights.

During her four years at the Environmental Defense Fund (now called Environmental Defense or "ED"), Barbara specialized in addressing community and workplace exposures to environmental toxins. During her tenure at ED, Barbara was instrumental in incorporating environmental justice concerns into the organization's docket and worked on a number of environmental racism cases, including those addressing the construction and operation of the Brooklyn Navy Yard Incinerator and the Bronx Lebanon Medical Waste Incinerator; and the exposure of workers in chemical and dye manufacturing industries. 

Prior to her employment at ED, Barbara worked at a small plaintiffs' employment discrimination and union representation firm in New York City. During her work in these areas, Barbara focused not only on the enforcement of traditional workplace issues such as wages, hours, and benefits, but also the occupational safety and health concerns of employees working in a wide range of industries. 

Barbara graduated from Stanford Law School in 1985, and clerked for two years for Rose E. Bird, Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court. She has written several articles on environmental racism, immigrants' rights, public access to radio programming and ownership, and a chapter on occupational exposures for the 2000 ABA treatise on environmental justice.