Upholding the Rule of Law

by Nicole Anderson

few years into running her Brooklyn law practice, Carrie Goldberg ’99 took on a client, Matthew Herrick, whose ex-boyfriend had been relentlessly stalking and harassing him on the dating app Grindr. The ex had created impersonation profiles and sent more than 1,000 strangers to Herrick’s home and workplace seeking drugs and violent sexual encounters. Herrick did everything he could to stop it—reporting the abuse to Grindr more than 100 times and filing criminal complaints against his ex. But nothing changed.

Goldberg first sent a cease-and-desist letter alerting Grindr to the ex-boyfriend’s actions. The company did not respond. She then went to court and secured a temporary restraining order barring the ex from using the app. But, Goldberg says, Grindr claimed it “didn’t have the technology to ban a user.” She didn’t buy it. How, she wondered, could one of the world’s most successful geolocation dating apps lack the ability to “identify and ban foreseeable predators?

“If you’ve not built a way to ban them, then it’s a product defect,” she says.

That realization marked a turning point, ultimately reshaping Goldberg’s approach to fighting Big Tech platforms. If Grindr was offering a product to consumers, she argued, it should be held to the same industry standards and safety precautions as a car manufacturer or baby food company. This meant employing the concept of product liability. So Goldberg sued Grindr for “having a defective product and failing to warn of a defect,” she says.

This strategy challenged Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the federal law that shields online platforms from being held legally responsible for what users post. Most tech companies have relied on it to insulate themselves from lawsuits. But in 2016, when Goldberg filed her case against Grindr, no one had applied product liability to an app; platforms were widely understood to provide services, not products.

“I’m not suing Grindr for content that is provided by a third party,” she explains. “I’m suing them because of the infrastructure of the product—and their decision not to include these basic safety functions.”

Goldberg lost the case. The courts, she recalled, “thought I was a total fool” and dismissed it. The Supreme Court declined to hear her appeal. But despite the loss, she was convinced she was onto something potentially game-changing.

“I just knew in my gut that it was the right theory,” she says.

Goldberg’s instincts paid off in her next case, against Omegle.com. In 2021, she represented a child who had been victimized from age 11 by a 37-year-old predator on the anonymous live-stream video platform. She sued the company for violating product liability and sex trafficking laws. This time, the tactic worked: Omegle settled with the victim and ultimately shut down. The case proved to be a watershed moment, demonstrating the impact of this approach in chipping away at Section 230 protections.

Since then, Goldberg has successfully deployed product liability—along with other groundbreaking legal strategies—to challenge the world’s largest tech companies, including Uber, Snapchat, Amazon, Google, Meta, and TikTok, on behalf of victims. The theory is now widely adopted by lawyers across the country. Today, her firm, C.A. Goldberg, PLLC—once a one-woman operation—has grown into a 14-person practice and is a driving force in holding both individuals and platforms accountable for harm and abuses of power.

“The thread that connects all our cases is that we’re representing an individual against something bigger, something huge and powerful,” she explains.

When Goldberg first opened her firm, she handled a number of cases involving revenge porn—the nonconsensual distribution of sexually explicit images or videos—at a time when few lawyers were willing to take them on. “I guess I am the expert, if there is nobody else,” she recalls thinking.

Goldberg has since been at the forefront of some of the decade’s most high-profile cases. She represented former Congresswoman Katie Hill, whose intimate images were published without her consent, and five of Harvey Weinstein’s accusers—work that helped lead to the disgraced Hollywood producer’s arrest and contributed to the momentum of the #MeToo Movement. In addition to her cases, Goldberg was named Northeastern Law’s Brown Forum for Women in the Law as its Practitioner-in-Residence from 2024–2025, and wrote the book Nobody’s Victim (Penguin Publishing Group, 2019), which examines sexual violence and privacy violations both online and offline.

In early January, a case drawing national attention landed on her desk. Ashley St. Clair, a conservative influencer who shares a child with Elon Musk, sought Goldberg’s legal counsel. In late December, Musk unveiled a new adaptation of his AI chatbot, Grok, developed by xAI, that allowed users on X to generate deepfakes—what Goldberg describes as “digital forgeries” used to manipulate photos, often depicting a person in a state of undress or in sexualized positions.

Over a nine-day period, sexualized images of women and children flooded the platform. According to reporting from The New York Times and research by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, Grok generated “at least 1.8 million sexualized images of women.” St. Clair, who had been embroiled in public disputes with Musk, became a target. Users created droves of disturbing and sexually explicit images of her without her consent.

“This was the first time that there had been a deepfake technology embedded into a widely used social media platform. So it meant that deepfakes not only could be created, but they could immediately and frictionlessly be spread,” says Goldberg.

In mid-January, she sued xAI on St. Clair’s behalf under her state’s deepfake statute and for public nuisance. Shortly thereafter, the company disabled the undressing feature. For Goldberg, the case is about more than a dangerous tool; it exposes what she sees as a key weakness in Section 230 defenses.

“The issue about Section 230 is really different because it applies to times when a platform is being held liable for content of a user, but generative AI is a platform’s own content, and so our position—and this has not been heavily litigated yet—is that Section 230 is not a defense for generative AI companies.”

Litigation, Goldberg says, is a powerful vehicle for effecting immediate change—especially if the “courts are just getting it wrong”—but she also sees it working in tandem with legislative reform.

“Back when I started my firm in 2014, only three states had revenge-porn laws. I spent so much time, right off the bat, advocating for more legislation around the country, especially in New York, and also getting changes on these platforms,” she says. “I’m very in favor of legislative change because that helps not just my client, but it can help millions of people. And now we have 50 states that have revenge-porn laws.”

Another significant piece of legislation, the Take It Down Act, went into effect last year. Federal law prohibits the nonconsensual publication of sexually explicit images, whether authentic or computer-generated. Beginning May 19, tech companies must implement systems to remove nonconsensual imagery or deepfakes within 48 hours. For Goldberg, the legislation is a step in the right direction—but it isn’t foolproof. “The shortcoming of the bill is that if a company doesn’t remove the content, there really aren’t consequences that an individual can enforce,” she says. Unlike copyright law, individuals cannot sue companies for failing to take posts down. “It’s in the hands of the regulators,” Goldberg says.

Nonetheless, Goldberg believes the law will play a critical role in ensuring that online platforms bear greater responsibility for inappropriate and unlawful content posted to their sites. “The good news is, though, that these platforms of a certain size have to develop an infrastructure and [a] really clear reporting method so that people can easily report images that are violating the Take It Down Act.”

Over the course of her career, Goldberg has both witnessed and driven meaningful change in the fight to secure justice for victims harmed by major tech platforms. In perhaps her most ambitious case, in February 2026, she scored a 9-0 victory against Amazon in Washington State Supreme Court after a five-year fight on behalf of 29 families to whom the online retailer sold suicide chemicals to their loved ones. But, she says, the path that led her there was far from linear.

After studying English and psychology at Vassar, she moved to New York City with college friends and no job lined up. She eventually found work as a case manager for Holocaust survivors and Nazi victims while attending law school at night. After earning her J.D. from Brooklyn Law School in 2007, she advocated for tenants facing eviction and later became Associate Director of Legal Services at the Vera Institute of Justice’s Project Guardianship, which provides support for elderly and disabled people without family. Through her work helping vulnerable populations and victims, she found her calling—and hopes students from Vassar reach out to her.

“I’m living my fantasy. I never would have dreamt when I was a student that I would get to have this kind of career,” she says. “I would hope that other people who don’t really know exactly what they want to do or what they want to major in—or who are kind of lost—know that there’s a world where they could ultimately, circuitously discover their life’s work.”

by Michael Blanding

here’s an adage in the legal profession that grand juries will “indict a ham sandwich”—that is, prosecutors have so much power over such juries that the approval of charges is a mere formality. That has become much less certain this past year, however, as grand juries have defied prosecutors in several politically charged cases brought by the Department of Justice. “There was a long time that people thought the grand jury system was antiquated,” says Elias S. Kim ’16, Associate in the Supreme Court and appellate practice at Cooley LLP. “Over the last year, that perception has changed.”

He should know. Kim was one of the lead lawyers defending former FBI Director James Comey against government prosecution, which accused Comey of lying under oath. The grand jury in the prosecution rejected an initial three-count indictment because it disagreed with at least one of the charges. But instead of presenting a new indictment, the prosecutors edited it by removing the one count they believed the grand jury had rejected and submitted it to the court. The Comey team argued that this violated the rules in a rushed prosecution of a perceived political opponent of the president. The team also argued that the attorney who presented the case to the grand jury was unlawfully appointed to her position. In November, a federal judge agreed, throwing out the charges in the case.

Currently, Kim is a lead lawyer defending Federal Reserve Board of Governors member Lisa Cook against efforts by the Trump administration to remove her. The case calls into question the president’s power to fire government officials with “for-cause” protections.

Just a decade after graduating from Vassar, Kim is thriving in the high-stakes legal environment. “You’re trying to establish a particular matter of law, but of course you are also explaining how the reasoning might apply in future cases,” he says. “As someone interested in government and politics, I like thinking about how cases fit into a broader set of goals and priorities.”

Kim didn’t grow up with ambitions to be a lawyer. The child of two humanities professors, he “rebelled” against his upbringing by initially becoming a physics major at Vassar. He was drawn to solving problems with concrete answers. After taking an intro course with Professor of Political Science Andrew Davidson, which focused on applying the political theories of Machiavelli, Locke, and Foucault to law, he changed course. “It gave me a rigorous ground of understanding for how to think about political analysis,” he says.

Attending Harvard Law School after graduation, Kim found himself behind his peers in technical understanding of the law, but ahead of them in philosophical awareness. “To be an effective person in this DC policy space, you have to have a grasp of both those things, and I think it’s easier to learn the broader concepts first and then learn the technical details.”

Kim decided he wanted to ultimately argue before the highest court in the country fresh out of law school, when he clerked for Judge Richard Taranto, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, who had served as an assistant to the Solicitor General, the section of the Justice Department that handles Supreme Court cases. “Just hearing him talk about the work that people in that office did, and the standards expected at the highest levels, made that something I wanted to aspire to myself,” Kim says.

Entering private practice at Cooley in 2020, he gained an early understanding of how lawsuits can help shape policy while working on a gun rights case involving “ghost guns,” untraceable weapons assembled from parts or kits available online or that are 3D-printed. The Trump administration argued the kits weren’t technically firearms, and therefore not subject to regulation. “Our position was that you had 80 percent of a completed firearm, with instructions to easily complete it. That was a firearm under federal law,” Kim recalled.

Just as he and his colleagues were set to argue the case, Joe Biden won the presidential election, and the Justice Department reversed its position, allowing ghost guns to be regulated, a decision that was later upheld in a 7–2 decision by the Supreme Court. “You don’t file a lawsuit unless you are trying to win it, but sometimes you are also raising the salience of a particular issue,” Kim says.

By that point, Kim had left to work in a series of government law positions. Among them was a prestigious Bristow Fellowship in the Solicitor General’s Office, a feeder program for future Supreme Court litigators. He returned to Cooley last summer with a new passion for using law to address policy issues.

In Lisa Cook’s case, Trump attempted to fire her for allegedly listing two properties as primary residences on mortgage forms. The case turns on whether that is sufficient to dismiss her “for cause,” and also whether the president’s determination can be reviewed in court.

On a broader level, the case concerns a philosophical dispute over the nature of presidential power and whether the chief executive can summarily replace officials at so-called independent agencies. While the Supreme Court appears poised to allow the president to fire officials at agencies like the Federal Trade Commission, it has indicated that the Federal Reserve’s unique history and structure present different considerations. However the case is decided, it could have wide-ranging implications for the central bank’s independence and stability. As Justice Brett Kavanaugh observed during the oral argument for the case at the Supreme Court, the administration’s position could “weaken, if not shatter, the independence of the Federal Reserve.” While the court’s decision is expected by summer, legal observers note that justices seem likely to deny the administration’s attempt to remove Cook without review.

Kim acknowledges that the current administration’s tendency to push the bounds of law makes it a challenging time to be a Supreme Court litigator. “In some ways, we’re arguing for things we thought were already settled,” he says. At the same time, he relishes having a say in how these decisions are made and is thankful to Cooley for giving him the opportunity to work on them. “There’s no better place to be a young lawyer,” he says.

by Sally Parker

rowing up in Oregon in the 1960s, Peggy Nagae ’73 was surrounded by the sights and sounds of the Civil Rights Movement. At the same time, she was dealing with the pain of injustice at home. The silent anger of her elders simmered just below the surface, sometimes exploding without warning—a result of their incarceration in American concentration camps during World War II. After the war, her family had to start all over.

“When I was growing up, we were really poor. I grew up without indoor plumbing and eating government surplus food in the winter,” Nagae recalls. “In the ’70s, I conducted an oral interview with my father, who told me he’d been bitter ever since the war.”

Nagae felt drawn to civil rights law. An opportunity to right the wrong her community endured came five years after law school. At a Day of Remembrance Program recognizing Executive Order 9066, the underlying justification for the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans, Nagae met Minoru Yasui, a lawyer and the first Japanese American member of the Oregon State Bar, who, in 1942, at the age of 25 purposely violated the military curfew imposed on Japanese Americans to test its constitutionality. He spent nine months in jail in solitary confinement, while his case wound its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where he lost.

In the early 1980s, new evidence revealed that the incarceration of Japanese Americans had been based on race and racism, and not national security, as government lawyers and other officials had claimed. Yasui enlisted Nagae to serve as lead counsel as he sought to reopen his case. A federal district court vacated the conviction in 1984, but the result fell short of the evidentiary hearing that Nagae had sought for her client. The case was on appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals when Mr. Yasui died, and the government moved to dismiss his appeal. The Ninth Circuit granted the government’s motion, which Nagae appealed to the Supreme Court and lost. The case was dismissed in 1986.

Unsettled by the outcome and at the request of his daughter, Holly Yasui, Nagae spearheaded an intensive nomination process for a Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the country. Yasui received this medal posthumously from President Obama in 2015. Nagae did not know at the time that Yasui was the only Oregonian to have received this award.

It’s no surprise that fighting injustice is the common thread throughout Nagae’s wide-ranging legal career. A consultant and activist in racial, gender, LGBT, generational, and other equality efforts, she has practiced in the courtroom, served as Assistant Dean at the University of Oregon Law School, and been Chief Operating Officer of a national diversity consulting firm that has worked with Fortune 500 companies. As a member of the Alumnae/i Association of Vassar College’s Board of Directors, she is the Vice Chair of an ad hoc committee focused on equity and inclusion.

Her drive to challenge Japanese American internment has echoes today in the rising resistance against ICE raids, detention, and deportation efforts, the majority of which have been without due process. The U.S. will not be a multiracial, multicultural, inclusive democracy, she says, until there’s a reckoning with the injustice upon which the nation was built.

Nagae is part of a group filing amicus briefs for upcoming Supreme Court cases to decide the constitutionality of actions by the current administration. Nearly 200 descendants of Japanese, German, and Italian immigrants who were detained during WWII under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 have signed on to an amicus brief filed in response to Trump’s invocation of that same act in March of 2025—providing an important historical reference point. Another brief addresses birthright citizenship, which the administration has challenged.

“The current administration is bringing up all these very fundamental issues of who has a right to be here: Whose country is it?” Nagae says. “Filing amicus briefs helps humanize what the court is talking about, helps provide additional legal arguments, and helps to underscore what’s at stake for U.S. democracy so the Supreme Court can be informed in the decisions it’s making. It’s not just numbers. It is about people and their families, and in many cases, it’s about the continuation of intergenerational trauma.”

Nagae cited statistics that show growing nonviolent protests can shift the political paradigm. Research by Harvard professor Erica Chenoweth and others led to the development of the “3.5% rule,” detailed in the books Why Civil Resistance Works (co-authored with Maria Stephan) and Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know. They found that no nonviolent protests with sustained participation that reached 3.5 percent of a country’s population has ever failed.

Nagae says that White involvement is critical in this effort, however. “It’s really important for White people to say, ‘I can do something. I can speak out and not leave it to immigrants or other communities of color. We must be in this together. That’s what worked in Minneapolis, and it can work elsewhere in this country.”

by Betty A. Marton

arch 2025, the Trump administration arrested noncitizen students from several leading universities because of their activities protesting the war in Gaza, saying that their presence had “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.” Last fall, Judge William G. Young of Boston’s Federal District Court determined that the government had violated the students’ First Amendment rights, and this past January, he issued his remedy—imposing targeted restrictions on what he described as the administration’s sweeping and unconstitutional abuse of power.

At the center of the suit brought by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the Middle East Studies Association was Sher Tremonte, a New York City boutique litigation firm founded in 2011 by Justin Sher and Michael Tremonte ’89. As co-counsel with the Knight First Amendment Institute, the firm drew on its deep trial experience and foundational commitment to the rule of law to convince the judge of the facts. The case led to the landmark win for noncitizens and freedom of expression.

“This ruling, coupled with the judge’s extraordinary decision on the merits, is significant not least of all because the judge found the administration engaged in an ‘unconstitutional conspiracy’ with the goal of intimidating all noncitizen scholars,” Tremonte explained. “Despite the appeals that will drag on, it was so gratifying to litigate a matter that directly impacts the First Amendment and how it applies to citizens and noncitizens across the country.”

A scenario of this significance was not within Tremonte’s vision of his future when he entered Vassar in 1985. Neither of his parents had gone to college, and during his freshman year, he was spellbound by the “feast of intellectual offerings.” Tremonte says he is forever grateful to Professors Rhoda Rappoport and Rachel Kitzinger, who took him under their wing, and Robert Pounder, who taught him Latin and set him on a path to become a classics professor. That path led him to Athens for a year at the American School of Classical Studies on a Vassar fellowship (the Abbey Leach Memorial Prize) and then to pursue a PhD in classics at Princeton. But after several years of graduate work, Tremonte recognized that the job market couldn’t support all of the talented aspiring academics in his cohort, and he changed course.

“I was heartbroken but determined that at that point in my life, law school made more sense,” he said.

During his time at New York University School of Law, Tremonte worked in the State Department, where he saw firsthand how the political philosophy he studied at Vassar and later in graduate school could be applied in the real world. He also became fascinated with litigation.

“Law school was a bridge between the intellectual rigor of classics and making a practical impact in the ‘real world,’” Tremonte said. “Litigation seemed attractive because it requires close reading and careful argumentation, which were familiar to me from classics, but also promised a clear professional structure, greater financial stability, and opportunities for tangible societal impact. I’m pleased to report that those initial impressions turned out to be spot on.”

Tremonte wants to spread the joy. “I still love litigating,” he reports, “but the best part of my job now that I’m a ‘senior’ attorney is mentoring young lawyers. It’s extremely gratifying to help someone mature into a highly accomplished professional in their own right.”

During the 15 years following law school, Tremonte moved back and forth between government positions and private firms in New York and built a family with his attorney spouse, Joanna Riesman. He eventually served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney for several years in the Eastern District of New York, where, in his last year as a federal prosecutor, he led a team that investigated and indicted the leadership of the Colombo organized crime family.

Those years made him aware of the tens of thousands of people working to uphold the rule of law and also gave him a sense of the unusual balance he wanted to strike between commercial and pro bono work—and that he wanted to strike out on his own. With two sons nearing college age, the financial risk was substantial, but one he and his founding partner, Justin Sher, were willing to take when they opened their doors in 2011.

“I thought the best route was to find a partner who shares my vision, and Justin does, 100 percent,” he continued. “It was a huge leap but one of the best decisions I ever made.”

That vision has since translated into a firm that devotes more than 20 percent of its resources to pro bono work—significantly more than the less than 4 percent that is the average for most law firms. Indigent defendants, victims of domestic violence, asylum seekers, environmental nonprofits, and other clients turn to Sher Tremonte to defend their rights, advocate for their interests, and give them a voice in the courtroom.

Significant cases include obtaining a landmark First Amendment ruling in the U.S. District Court for the Second Circuit for a prisoner who faced retaliation from guards for refusing to become an informant, obtaining compassionate release for vulnerable clients serving sentences in federal custody during the COVID-19 pandemic, and securing a highly favorable settlement on behalf of a woman who was physically assaulted by police officers. In addition, the firm regularly drafts amicus briefs on behalf of public interest organizations in courts of appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court.

From their initial two-person partnership, Sher Tremonte now employs over 30 attorneys plus paralegals and administrative staff, many of whom are veterans of a wide range of public service organizations such as the ACLU, the Equal Justice Initiative, and the Bronx Defenders as well as the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the U.S. Department of Justice, and the New York County District Attorney’s Office.

Most recently, Deirdre von Dornum, a former Supreme Court clerk for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and one of the leading trial lawyers in the country, joined the firm—they first met when both were grad students in classics at Princeton and again when von Dornum was in charge of the Federal Defenders in the Eastern District of New York.

Although perhaps the most notable, the AAUP case is just one of the suits Sher Tremonte has filed in response to the current administration’s challenging of traditional boundaries of the rule of law. In December 2025, the firm sued members of the federal administration on behalf of ICEBlock, a free app that crowdsources publicly available sightings of ICE operations and alerts the community within a four-mile radius. ICEBlock had over 1 million users when Apple removed it from the App Store in October 2025, allegedly pressured by government officials who repeatedly denounced it as illegal, threatened to investigate and criminally prosecute its developer, and denounced media outlets who publicized its existence. The firm also successfully represented the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol when the first Trump administration sought to impede access to documents the committee subpoenaed in connection with its January 6th investigation.

“Our commitment is to the rule of law, and we direct our extraordinary resources to that and to pro bono work with the same vigor and diligence that we apply to billable matters,” Tremonte emphasized. “It’s the kind of work that makes me enormously proud.”