Shayana Kadidal

Shayana Kadidal is senior managing attorney of the Guantanamo litigation at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City. He is a 1994 graduate of Yale Law School and a former law clerk to Judge Kermit Lipez of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. In his twenty years at the Center, he has worked on a number of significant cases arising in the wake of 9/11, including the Center’s challenges to the detention of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay (among them torture victim Mohammed al Qahtani and former CIA ghost detainee Majid Khan), which have twice reached the Supreme Court, and several cases arising out of the post-9/11 domestic immigration sweeps. He was also counsel in three other cases that reached the Supreme Court: CCR’s challenges to the “material support” statute, to the domestic immigration sweeps and disappearances after 9/11, and to the No-Fly List. He led CCR’s litigation against the NSA’s warrantless surveillance program and challenges that ultimately resulted in the public release of hundreds of documents during the court-martial of Pvt. Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning. Together with the late Leonard Weinglass and Michael Ratner, he advised Wikileaks founder Julian Assange on the scope of the Espionage Act.