Nancy Hollander is an internationally recognized criminal defence lawyer in the New Mexico firm of Freedman Boyd Hollander Goldberg Urias & Ward. She is also an Associate Tenant at London’s Doughty Street Chambers and Of Counsel to the Geneva firm of Savolainen Avocats.

Ms. Hollander has been admitted to practice in the US Supreme Court and in several federal and military courts. She is also on the list of counsel for the ICC as well as the DOJ Pool of Qualified Civilian Defence Counsel for Military Commissions.

For more than four decades, Ms. Hollander’s practice has largely been devoted to representing individuals and organizations accused of crimes, including those involving national security issues, in trial and on appeal. She was lead appellate counsel for Chelsea Manning in her appeal and she won Ms. Manning’s release in 2017 when President Obama commuted her sentence from 35 years to seven years. Ms. Hollander has also represented two prisoners at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, and in 2016, she won the release of one of them – Mohamedou Ould Slahi – who had been incarcerated for 14 years without charge. His story is chronicled in his New York Times-bestselling book, Guantanamo Diary, which Ms. Hollander helped facilitate and publish and in a feature film, entitled The Mauritanian.

Her other client at Guantanamo, Abd Rahim Al-Nashiri, is facing the death penalty. While consulting with the Open Society Justice Initiative, she helped win two cases for him in the European Court of Human Rights, providing funds for his family and accountability for his torture at the hands of agents of the US government. She continues to represent him and consult with other attorneys for him in European and UK venues.

In addition to her criminal defence practice, Ms. Hollander has been counsel in numerous civil cases, forfeitures, and administrative hearings, and she has argued and won an historic case involving religious freedom in the US Supreme Court. Ms. Hollander has also served as a consultant to the defence in other international cases.

She has taught in numerous trial practice programs in the US and internationally. She has also written extensively and conducted more than 200 seminars and presentations around the globe on various subjects, including the securing of evidence in international cases, forfeiture, illegal search and seizure, expert witnesses, defence of child abuse cases, ethics, evidence, and trial practice.

In 1992-93, Ms. Hollander was the first woman president of the National Association of Criminal Defence Lawyers. Ms. Hollander has also received many professional awards. Among them, in 2001, she was named as one of America’s top 50 women litigators by the National Law Journal.