About Us

Lynn Hecht Schafran

Senior Vice President; Director, National Judicial Education Program

Lynn Hecht Schafran is Senior Vice President at Legal Momentum and has been director of Legal Momentum's National Judicial Education Program to Promote Equality for Women and Men in the Courts (NJEP) since 1981. Lynn also serves as a senior staff attorney, litigating and writing in the areas of sexual harassment, rape, domestic violence, and family law.

Established in 1980 and co-sponsored by the National Association of Women Judges, NJEP initiated judicial education about gender bias in the courts nationwide. Ms. Schafran has been on the faculty of numerous national, state and federal judicial colleges in the United States and Canada and is an advisor to the state supreme court and federal circuit task forces on gender bias in the courts for which NJEP was the catalyst. She is co-author of several model judicial education curricula in use across the country including When Bias Compounds: Insuring Equal Justice for Women of Color in the Courts and Understanding Sexual Violence: The Judicial Response to Stranger and Nonstranger Rape and Sexual Assault and its DVD version. Her most recent project is a Web course/resource for judges and others titled Intimate Partner Sexual Abuse: Adjudicating this Hidden Dimension of Domestic Violence Cases, available at www.njep-ipsacourse.org. Registration is free and open to all. 

Lynn is also widely published on issues respecting gender bias in the law, the courts, and the legal profession. She was an original member of the American Bar Association Commission on Women in the Profession from l987 to 1993 and since then has continuously served as special advisor and then liaison to it. She has received numerous awards for her work to eliminate gender bias in the courts and the profession, among them the American Bar Association Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Award, the Smith College Medal, the Columbia Law Public Interest Fellows Award, and the American Law Institute-American Bar Association Rawle Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Continuing Education of the Legal Profession.