Professor Matthew Segal, co-director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s State Supreme Court Initiative, is joining the political science department for a second semester as a professor of practice this fall.
While pre-law students are relatively common at Tufts, many miss out on opportunities to get direct exposure in the field before making the decision to pursue a law degree. In Segal’s around 50-person course, “Topics in American Politics: Intro to Federal & State Constitutional Law,” students benefit from the mentorship of a professor with extensive courtroom experience while comparing and contrasting state and federal supreme courts.
Prior to stepping into his co-director role, Segal was the legal director of ACLU Massachusetts for 11 years and an assistant federal defender in North Carolina for four years.
Segal incorporates his work experiences in the classroom by helping students develop specific analytical skills that he uses in his own career.
“I try to bring my perspective on what it means to be a good lawyer. … I’m trying to help the students to reason, to think, to do legal analysis, to consider how they could be wrong, to anticipate what the counter arguments to their positions might be, because I think those skills are really valuable, whether they become lawyers or not,” Segal said. “If you’re just conducting your work life convinced of your own righteousness, then you’ll be taken by surprise, by judges and by adversaries, because you will have failed to appreciate their point of view, and you will have failed to anticipate their arguments.”
Segal does not typically teach undergraduates, having previously taught at Northeastern University School of Law and Yale Law School. He expressed an interest in teaching undergraduates as opposed to law students because of the opportunity to engage with students earlier in their careers.
“I thought [teaching undergraduates] would be really interesting and a way to challenge myself to learn more, but also catch students a little bit earlier in their thinking about themselves and what they want to do,” Segal said.
In all of his courses, both at the graduate and undergraduate level, Segal chooses to teach constitutional law in a less conventional format.
“A lot of constitutional law courses around the country are focused on federal constitutional law, U.S. constitutional law — that’s not what I do. I do a mix of federal and state constitutional law,” Segal said.
State constitutional law is Segal’s specialty. In 2023, he helped launch the ACLU’s State Supreme Court Initiative as “an effort to be more strategic about and put more resources into expanding civil rights and civil liberties at the state level.”
This ACLU expansion comes at a time when such rights are being targeted at the national level. In response, Segal and other lawyers find themselves turning to states to provide protections.
“State constitutions play a pretty powerful role in protecting people’s rights and liberties, and that’s always true, but it’s particularly true now because the U.S. Supreme Court is headed in a more conservative direction,” Segal said.
States are able to fill in the gaps present in the U.S. Constitution by interpreting its state constitution to provide broader freedoms for its citizens, as long as the state doesn’t come into conflict with the U.S. Constitution. Oftentimes there is no conflict when the U.S. Constitution says that a right is absent and a state says that it is present.
“The example that people use a lot is abortion. So, the Supreme Court has said that there’s no constitutional right to abortion under the U.S. Constitution, but that leaves states to interpret their constitutions to protect a right to abortion. So there’s a lot of room for states to offer more protection than the U.S. Constitution does,” Segal said.
Over the course of his career, Segal has worked on numerous influential cases. Two of the most famous, the Sonja Farak and the Annie Dookhan drug lab cases, have led to the dismissal of over 61,000 drug charges in Massachusetts. These cases have since been made into a documentary series on Netflix titled “How to Fix a Drug Scandal.”
In his current position, Segal also interacts with lawyers around the country, working with state ACLU affiliates as well as lawyers within the State Supreme Court Initiative.
While lawyers tend to come under scrutiny for their individualism and competitiveness, Segal emphasized that collaboration is an essential part of his job. In addition to working with other lawyers, Segal also works closely with professionals in other fields.
In the drug lab scandals, for example, one of Segal’s colleagues collaborated with a data scientist to show that most of the convictions were possession charges, which are deemed less-serious than other drug offenses.
“We had been hearing arguments that the sky will fall if you overturn these convictions, because these are horrible offenders and they’ve done terrible things and so forth,” Segal said. “Showing that … actually these are mostly possession charges in district court defeated that argument pretty handily, and the data scientist is cited by name in the Bridgeman opinion.”
Segal himself studied math and sociology as an undergraduate at Brandeis University. It wasn’t until later in his undergraduate career that he considered law school, when he came to see it as a way to bridge his two interests.
“I felt like the law was how institutions in our society, people in our society, try to apply a sort of mathematical logic to sociological problems to set up rules for people that will help them,” Segal said.
Even when attending Yale Law School, Segal didn’t think that he would actually practice law.
“I thought I would teach or write or do something that wasn’t necessarily litigating, but it turned out that I liked litigation,” Segal said.
When giving advice to pre-law students, Segal highlights that it is okay for students to follow a non-linear path.
“Not everything that you do in life has to be maximizing the potential career outcomes,” Segal said. “It’s okay to chill out a little bit and not to put so much pressure on yourself to know what is going to happen in your life.”
Whether his students choose to become lawyers or not, seeing the next generation of students flourish in his classroom brings Segal hope for the future.
“The jury’s out on whether my generation is going to succeed in protecting everyone’s rights and liberties,” Segal said. “If there was a scoreboard, I think we’re maybe behind at the moment. One of the things I can do, in addition to trying to win more court cases, is to try to help students to build their skills and map out their careers so that they can come to the rescue.”
Professor Segal’s passion for his work is evident. During uncertain and often discouraging times, Segal seeks to ignite that same passion in students to ensure that Americans continue to protect their rights.
