Nancy Northup is the President of the Center for Reproductive Rights, a global human rights organization that uses constitutional and international law to secure women's reproductive freedom. The Center has won groundbreaking cases before federal and state courts, U.N. committees, and regional human rights bodies, such as the European Court of Human Rights. Working at the state, national, and international levels, the Center has built the legal capacity of women's rights advocates around the world, working in over 45 countries.

Ms. Northup is an attorney with extensive experience in constitutional impact litigation, criminal law, and reproductive rights advocacy.

Since joining the Center for Reproductive Rights, Ms. Northup has served as key strategist in both domestic and international litigation. Under her leadership the Center has taken on bold cases in the U.S. and abroad. In just the past two years, the Center has, among many other victories, filed suit against the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for its failure to make emergency contraception available over the counter, successfully challenged a Kansas law that would have required all sexual activity of minors under sixteen to be reported to the state. The Center was in the Supreme Court last term in Gonzales v. Carhart challenging the first ever federal abortion ban. Under her direction, the Center has broken new ground internationally, winning the first abortion case ever considered by the United Nations Human Rights Committee. The case, K.L. v. Peru, established that access to abortion, where legal, is a basic human right.

Ms. Northup holds adjunct appointments at NYU Law School and Columbia Law School and has taught courses in constitutional and human rights law. She has trained lawyers in litigation strategy in the Philippines, Nigeria and Bulgaria.

Before joining the Center in 2003, she was the founding Director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, where she litigated voting rights, campaign finance reform, and ballot access cases. From 1989 to 1996, she served as a prosecutor and Deputy Chief of Appeals in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York.

Ms. Northup graduated from Brown University and Columbia Law School, where she was a Kent Scholar and Managing Editor of the Columbia Law Review. She served as a law clerk to the Honorable Alvin B. Rubin of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans.

A frequent public speaker, Ms. Northup is quoted widely in the national press and has appeared on ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, FOX News, PBS, MSNBC and NPR.