During the 2016 US presidential election, Rachel Goodman ’10 says, she was troubled by online disinformation campaigns aimed at preventing or discouraging some Americans—often people of color—from voting. Goodman, who was then a staff attorney for the ACLU’s Racial Justice Program, felt a need to do more to strengthen US democracy. In 2019, she became counsel at the nonpartisan, anti-authoritarian nonprofit Protect Democracy, where she helms a team, called Safeguarding the Public Square, that uses litigation and other advocacy to combat the spread of anti-democratic disinformation online.
“I think being a litigator and litigating for a more just and inclusive democracy in an era where the judiciary sometimes feels really hostile to that goal is a big challenge,” says Goodman. “Our job is to navigate around that and find the cases and the causes of action that resonate with everybody who believes in the rule of law, across the political spectrum,” she says.
After graduating from the Law School, where she was an Arthur Garfield Hays Civil Liberties and Civil Rights Fellow, Goodman clerked for Judge Joseph Greenaway at the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit before spending eight years at the ACLU working on racial and economic justice issues.
In this Q&A, Goodman discusses growing up in a family of lawyers, the importance of holding bad actors accountable, and why she feels grateful to work on pressing issues.
How did you first become interested in a legal career? Why NYU Law?
So I came from a family of lawyers, actually a family of NYU lawyers—both of my parents are retired alums. My mom was an insurance coverage litigator who ran her own firm for many years, and my dad was an M&A lawyer. My mom jokes that in kindergarten she first heard me say, “I have three points to make,” and she knew it was too late.
In high school, I read a lot about educational segregation in the US and social welfare policies. By the time I was in college [at Yale College], I knew I wanted to do something with government and policy, but it took me a while to settle on becoming a lawyer. After college, I had an amazing experience working as a legal assistant at the ACLU’s Racial Justice Program, and that showed me the work you can do in the law and as a litigator that would serve my values.
Funnily enough, my parents didn’t have a lot to do with my coming to NYU Law. I’m a New Yorker by birth, and of the top-tier schools I applied to, I felt like NYU Law was the one where you went if you wanted to be a public interest lawyer and be a part of the public interest community. That was really important to me and helped me make my decision.
Tell me about Protect Democracy. What are the most pressing issues you’re working on leading up to the 2024 election?
A big part of our work here for the last few years has been our Law for Truth project, which aims to use defamation litigation to create accountability for folks who intentionally and recklessly spread election lies. We have or have had five litigation cases so far—three in state courts and two in federal—seeking to hold the spreaders of disinformation accountable. In December 2023, we secured a $148 million jury verdict for our clients [Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Wandrea’ ArShaye Moss] against Rudy Giuliani [for his false remarks about their work on the night of the 2020 presidential election]. I was really proud to be part of that team.
My work really focuses on the threat of election subversion, which is the threat that the winners of the election according to the preexisting rules don’t end up taking office because there’s some official action that subverts the will of the voters. Election disinformation often fuels those threats by providing narratives that are used to justify disregarding the results of the election—like that legal votes have been thrown out, or illegal votes counted, and that sort of thing.
We need to help people see through those narratives online, but we also need to figure out how to make our election systems resilient to them.
Protect Democracy as a whole is also really focused on preparing for the possibility of an authoritarian in the White House in 2025 and shoring up our systems in all the ways that we can for that possibility.
What do you like about the work you do?
I feel extraordinarily grateful I have work to do that feels meaningful and impactful in this space and I don’t have to read the news and think, “There is nothing to be done.” Because there’s quite a lot of good work to be done. We [at Protect Democracy] have more than we can do, even as we’ve grown quite a lot as an organization in recent years. And so to me, being able to spend my time doing that work is an incredible gift.
This interview has been edited and condensed. Posted June 25, 2024.