November 21, 2023 – The Center for Constitutional Rights mourns the passing of Holly Maguigan, a pathbreaking criminal defense lawyer, teacher, and scholar who changed public understanding of how the law should treat survivors of domestic violence. She served on the boards of important institutions like MADRE and the William Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice and was on the faculty at NYU Law School for 30 years. The only thing that rivaled Holly's passion for social justice was her love of family, including her daughter, grandchildren, and husband, Abdeen Jabara, a former beloved member of our staff and board. Holly mentored many of us – and inspired all of us with her visionary work leveraging the law to forge social progress.  

Holly was a key figure in a transformative legal movement that legitimized the self-defense defense in domestic violence cases. This was a virtually unheard-of concept at the outset of her career as a public defender. “The battered women cases I was working on were quite consuming because people then didn’t know how to try these cases,” she explained. “The judges expected you to plead insanity or guilty.” Respect for the dignity and humanity of women guided her work, always. She urged lawyers and advocates to move beyond the reductive confines of so-called battered women’s syndrome “to explain the impact of intimate violence without appearing to pathologize women and deny their reason and capacity.”

With her passion, brilliance, grace, sharp wit, and empathy, Holly embodied everything we value at the Center for Constitutional Rights. We will miss her terribly, and we will do our best to live up to the lofty standards she set.