Donald H. Zeigler

Professor of Law
Codirector, Center for Professional Values & Practice

It was in law school that Donald H. Zeigler’s commitment to legal reform was first ignited.

“I was at Columbia in the late 1960s, the era when public interest law was just beginning,” Professor Zeigler recalls. “It was a time of major reforms in the criminal justice and welfare systems and it triggered my interest. I wanted to use my law degree to help effect social change.”

When he graduated from Columbia Law School in 1969, Professor Zeigler was appointed as a staff law clerk, first at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, from 1969–70, and then at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, from 1970–72.

“There was a criminal justice revolution going on in the courts, and there were lots of habeas corpus cases being filed by prisoners who, having exhausted their state appeals, wanted their cases considered in federal court,” recalls Professor Zeigler.

As a law clerk for pro se litigants, he worked for all the judges reviewing petitions, making recommendations and drafting opinions. “It was also a time when class action lawsuits challenging squalid prison conditions were making significant breakthroughs, and that was exciting,” he says.

“My clerkships provided a real look at the internal workings of the courts and clearly led to the beginning of my interest in criminal constitutional issues.” He wrote about his experience in a law review article, “The Invisible Litigant: An Inside View of Pro Se Actions in the Federal Courts.”

In 1973, Professor Zeigler joined the New York City Legal Aid Society as a staff attorney in the Special Litigation Unit. He became the head of the unit in 1975. For five years he helped bring a number of federal civil class action suits seeking to reform the New York City criminal justice system, challenging, among other things, the operation of the bail system, grand jury selection procedures, conditions in courthouse detention pens, and shortcomings in New York’s computerized criminal history information system.

When an increasingly conservative Supreme Court made it more difficult for the Legal Aid Society to get its cases heard, Professor Zeigler started writing a series of law review articles challenging the legal doctrines that the Supreme Court was using to deny access to the courts and presenting the Special Litigation Unit’s substantive reform theories.

“Our cases were being thrown out of court, and this way we could at least ensure that some of our empirical studies and legal arguments in support of change would be read and discussed,” explains Professor Zeigler about the strategy. Over the next several years, he published articles in some of the nation’s leading law reviews.

In 1978 Professor Zeigler was invited to join the faculty of Pace University School of Law, where he taught for the next six years and was granted tenure. It was during this time that his interest shifted somewhat away from the criminal justice system and expanded to broader themes of federalism and separation of powers, areas in which he continues to write and teach.

Academic life has proven to be a continuation of his commitment to public interest law, and his scholarship continues to urge legal reform.

“What we do here really is, to me, in the public interest. We train tomorrow’s lawyers and we work hard to make them competent and ethical,” Professor Zeigler explains.