Hershkoff is the Herbert M. and Svetlana Wachtell Professor of Constitutional Law and Civil Liberties and co-director of the Arthur Garfield Hays Civil Liberties Program at New York University School of Law. A member of the NYU faculty since 1995, Hershkoff previously practiced law for almost two decades as a litigation associate at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison; as a staff attorney with the Legal Aid Society of New York; and as an associate legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union. Hershkoffs teaching focuses on civil procedure and federal courts. She also is a nationally recognized scholar on state constitutions.
Hershkoff is a member of the International Association of Procedural Law. She currently serves on the boards of the Brennan Center for Justice and of the Urban Justice Center and helped to establish Party for Humanity, Inc., a nonprofit organization. She is a fellow of the American Bar Foundation.
Hershkoff is a 1973 graduate of Radcliffe-Harvard College, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in her junior year. She earned her J.D. from the Harvard Law School, and a B.A. and an M.A. in modern history from St. Anne's College, Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar from 1973 to 1975 and received her degree with first-class honors.
She actively engages with pedagogy, and her writing includes articles on the teaching of civil procedure. Two of her articles on state constitutions appeared in the Harvard Law Review, and she also was honored to deliver the 14th annual Lecture on State Constitutional Law at Rutgers Law School. Her essay, "State Common Law and the Dual Enforcement of Constitutional Norms," will appear in Dual Enforcement of Constitutional Rights: New Frontiers of State Constitutional Law (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2010). Her article, Just Words: Common Law and the Enforcement of State Constitutional Social and Economic Rights, will appear in Volume 63 of the Stanford Law Review (forthcoming 2010). An important part of Hershkoffs scholarship focuses on public-interest litigation and the role of the courts in effecting social change. With Stephen Loffredo, she is co-author of The Rights of the Poor (1997). She served as a consultant to the Ford Foundation on its Global Learning Program Initiative and also completed a consultancy to the World Bank.
In 1995, her last year as a full-time practitioner, New York Magazine named Hershkoff one of New York's best civil rights lawyers.