Barbara Handschu

Who is Barbara Handschu?

Barbara Ellen Handschu is an American political activist and lawyer whose surname was memorialized on a set of federal guidelines "[ordering] restrictions on police surveillance ... signed by the city [of New York] in 1985".

Handschu graduated from New York University and the University of Michigan Law School, but began her career as a law secretary to Justice Hilda Schwartz until her 1969 arrest at a squatters' demonstration in Manhattan caused her to switch careers to criminal defense lawyer.

Judge Charles S. Haight, Jr., the federal judge who signed off on the guidelines in 1985 "relaxed them, ostensibly to assist antiterrorism detection" in 2003. In 2005, the same year Handschu herself appeared at an anti-Iraq War protest, Judge Haight ordered the NYPD "in a 51-page order ... to change its surveillance practices at events where people gather to exercise their First Amendment rights".