Hoffman

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Paul Lindsey Hoffman

Bostwick & Hoffman

Specialty: Constitutional and civil rights litigation

Law School: New York University, 1976

Former ACLU legal director Paul Hoffman is working on what he considers the most significant human rights case now taking place a class-action suit filed by refugees claiming torture and forced labor on an oil pipeline in Burma.

At the same time, Hoffman is juggling a case filed in New York in which another oil company is being sued for human rights violations in Nigeria, where an activist was hanged.

Fighting civil rights abuses in Los Angeles and elsewhere is what Hoffman does best. He has litigated dozens of cases involving racial and sexual discrimination. A number have gone to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In some of his most notable cases, Hoffman successfully represented victims of human rights violations under former Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, as well as students with AIDS who had been barred from classrooms.

As legal director of the L.A. chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1984 to 1994, he supervised 10 staff attorneys and more than 100 volunteer lawyers with cases involving issues ranging from police abuse and spying to the death penalty.

Before taking over the local ACLU office, he spent eight years as a volunteer attorney for the organization while working for the law firm of Loeb and Loeb.

Hoffman returned to private practice in 1994 and has handled a variety of cases. Not all of them have been played out on an international stage.

In 1997, he represented 23-year-old Zurick Sellers in a lawsuit alleging discrimination against the Antelope Valley Mall over a dress code designed to keep away gang members. Unaware of the code, Sellers wore his Pittsburgh Steelers cap backward and declined to turn it around when approached by a deputy patrolling the mall. He was handcuffed and arraigned on charges of intimidating business owners before Hoffman helped get the charges dismissed and won a $45,000 civil judgment.

Nola L. Sarkisian

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