Vice President and General Counsel
Eileen Hershenov heads the organization's legal department, providing legal advice and representation on a wide range of issues,
ranging from not-for-profit law compliance to managing litigation. She also oversees the work of outside counsel.
Before joining Consumer Reports in 2005, Ms. Hershenov spent eleven years with the Open Society Institute (OSI) network, the
international group of private foundations created and funded by financier and philanthropist George Soros. For most of that
time she served as the network's General Counsel, heading an in-house legal department, and advising affiliated foundations
and programs in nearly 50 countries worldwide. She also served as the General Counsel to the Central European University,
a New York State-accredited graduate university with a principal campus in Budapest, Hungary, and as counsel to the Baltic-American
Partnership Fund, a grant-making partnership between the U.S. Government and OSI.
From 1992 to 1994, Ms. Hershenov was a litigation associate with the law firm of Morrison & Foerster in New York, focusing
on intellectual property and antitrust litigation, as well as on pro bono litigation for the American Civil Liberties Union
(ACLU), the National Organization of Women (NOW) Legal Defense Fund and individual plaintiffs in employment discrimination
cases. Prior to that, she served as a Karpatkin Fellow with the ACLU after completing a year as a law clerk to U.S. District
Court Judge Jack B. Weinstein.
Before law school, she worked as an organizer and advocate for the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG), where
she led a statewide campaign to change the New York State statute of limitations law so that victims of toxic substances such
as asbestos or the drug DES could sue manufacturers in instances where injury manifested many years after the last exposure.
A member of the New York State Bar, she is a graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School. She is the author of The Effect
of Equity on Mass Tort Law (1991, with Judge Jack B. Weinstein) and Hostage to the Drug War: The National Purse, the Constitution
and the Black Community (1991, with John A. Powell). She lives in Westchester County with her husband, a writer, and two children.
|
