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Martin Garbus graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1951. He earned his undergraduate degree at Hunter College in 1955 and his Juris Doctor from New York University Law School. He thereafter attended Columbia University as a Master’s Candidate in economics, at The New School as a Master’s Candidate in English and at New York University Law School as a Master’s Candidate in tax law. He wrote for the New York University Law Review. He was admitted to the United States Supreme Court Bar in 1963.

The Guardian called Martin Garbus “one of the world’s finest trial lawyers” and the “founding partner of one of America’s most prestigious law firms”. In 2007, Business Week called him "legendary," “a ferocious lawyer who has received numerous media citations as one of America’s leading trial lawyers” and a "ferocious litigator". Time Magazine named him "legendary, one of the best trial lawyers in the country." Fortune magazine called him, "One of the nation's premier First Amendment attorneys," and "legendary," Reuters called him a “famed lawyer” while other media have called him "America's most prominent First Amendment lawyer" with an "extraordinarily diverse practice" and "one of the country's top ten litigators." Super Lawyers Magazine designated him as a “Superlawyer.” New York magazine and Los Angeles magazine, over the last twelve years have named him both as one of America’s best trial lawyers, and one of America’s best intellectual property lawyers.

Mr. Garbus has won several awards for his work:

• PEN USA First Amendment Award of Honor, 2007,
• New York University Law Alumni Achievement Award, 2004,
• Hunter College Law Alumni Achievement Award, 2005
• Hunter College Hall of Fame, 2005
• Marquis Who's Who in America (2006 & prior years)
• Marquis Who's Who in American Law (2006 & prior years)
• Civil Liberties Union Award, 2007

Mr. Garbus was involved in the following notable cases:

• Argued in Supreme Court case Goldberg v. Kelly (397 U.S. 254), a successful key 5-4 due process decision.
• Argued in the Supreme Court after a trial in Alabama, Mr. Garbus won, in King v. Smith (392 U.S. 309), a unanimous 9-0 decision striking down laws in 14 states on the grounds they violated the Constitution. These laws had disenfranchised one million people
• Served as co-counsel in Ashton v. Kentucky (384 U.S. 195), a Supreme Court decision that struck down all criminal libel laws in the United States
• Served as co-counsel in Jacobellis v. Ohio (378 U.S. 184), where the Supreme Court held unconstitutional an Ohio statute seeking to regulate motion pictures and, for the first time, defined the term “national community standards.”
• Represented Lenny Bruce in a high profile criminal case in New York, successfully asserting a First Amendment defense against an obscenity charge.
• Represented Don Imus when he was fired by CBS by asserting a First Amendment defense.
• Represented Viking Press and Peter Matthiessen in one of the longest and most bitterly fought libel cases in American history that led to the development of libel precedent favoring journalists and publishers. Governor William Janklow filed a libel suit in South Dakota and FBI agents filed suit in Minnesota claiming they were libeled by In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (see Peter Matthiessen#Crazy_Horse_lawsuits). The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the dismissal of the $450 million case and the Supreme Court refused to reverse it.
• Represented sixteen defendants in murder cases, stopping their executions, while chairing the Committee to Abolish Capital Punishment.
• Represented civil rights leader Cesar Chavez in free speech, commercial and criminal cases in California and elsewhere in the United States, all in support of the United Farm Workers.
• Represented criminal defendants in the French Connection criminal cases in New York Federal Court.
• Sued Eminem in copyright suit on behalf of French composer Jacques Loussier under New York Federal Court.
• Represented author Pia Pera in a copyright dispute with the estate of Vladimir Nabakov.
• Represented author Terry McMillan in commercial suit in San Francisco Federal Court to set aside a settlement agreement.
• Other notable clients include Nelson Mandela, Andrei Sakharov, Václav Havel, Samuel Beckett and Al Pacino.
• Garbus is representing songwriter and pianist, Oksana Grigorieva against actor Mel Gibson. Grigorieva alleges that Gibson beat her during their relationship and then defamed her in the media. The case has garnered significant publicity.

Mr. Garbus has participated in lectures and debates before the American Bar Association, the Bar Associations of New York, Washington and Los Angeles on a variety of topics including trial practice, jury selection, copyright and the Supreme Court. Mr. Garbus debated former Independent Prosecutor Kenneth Starr at venues across the country. He served as a commentator for NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, CNN, Fox News, Court TV, Time and Newsweek. Martin Garbus blogs for the Huffington Post[1].

Mr. Garbus is featured in the HBO documentary Shouting Fire: Stories from the Edge of Free Speech, which is directed by his daughter Liz Garbus.

After law school and after two years in the United States Army, he clerked for Émile Zola Berman, an internationally-known trial lawyer, and Ephraim London, a Supreme Court advocate and Constitutional lawyer who won every one of the nine cases he argued before the Supreme Court. He was in 1966 Co-Director of the Columbia University Center on Social Policy and Law while he taught law at Columbia. He was Director Counsel of the Roger Baldwin Foundation of the ACLU, Legal Director and Associate Director of the ACLU, as well as Director of the Lawyers Committee to Defend Civil Rights, ran for political office in 1974, formed his own law firm, Frankfurt Garbus, in 1977, and in 2003 became a partner at Davis & Gilbert. He subsequently taught at an adjunct professor at Yale Law School, and has lectured at many law schools, including Harvard University Law School and Stanford Law School. A Fulbright Scholar, he taught in 2005 and 2006 at Tsinghua and Renmin law schools in Beijing, China. At the same time he taught judges, government officials and drafters of China’s new laws.

Martin Garbus has worked for the governments of the former Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Poland, China, and Rwanda as a consultant on constitutional, media and communications law. Recently, the government of China hired Mr. Garbus to help address the problems posed by digital piracy. He represented dissidents Václav Havel , Nelson Mandela and Andrei Sakharov. In 2004, he was appointed advisor to the Chinese team responsible for the creation of China's intellectual property laws.