NANCY NORTHUP
Nancy Northup is a prominent American attorney and reproductive rights advocate who has dedicated her career to advancing civil liberties and human rights.
Born in Kokomo, Indiana, Nancy grew up across Texas, California, and New York before going on to graduate magna cum laude from Brown University — one of America's oldest and most prestigious research universities, founded in 1764 and notably the first American college to formally prohibit religious discrimination in the admission and instruction of its students.
She went on to receive her J.D. from Columbia Law School, where she was a Kent Scholar and managing editor of the Columbia Law Review.
Before joining the Center for Reproductive Rights, Nancy had an accomplished legal career that included serving as a federal prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York and as the founding director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, where she litigated cases involving voting rights, campaign finance reform, and ballot access.
She has served as president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights since 2003. Under her leadership, she has grown the organization's annual budget from $6 million to more than $65 million and its staff to 270 employees, supported by a multitude of lawyers around the world who work pro bono on cases.
The Center now has offices in New York, Washington D.C., Bogotá, Nairobi, and Geneva, and has built the legal capacity of women's rights advocates in over 60 countries.
Nancy has led the Center's involvement in landmark litigation in U.S. federal and state courts, including the landmark Supreme Court victory in Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt, a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case decided in 2016, and it's considered one of the most important reproductive rights rulings since Roe v. Wade.
Under her leadership, the Center for Reproductive Rights launched an international litigation campaign that included the first abortion case decided by the U.N. Human Rights Committee and the first case to frame preventable maternal deaths as a human rights violation. The Center has also won groundbreaking cases before regional human rights bodies, including the European Court of Human Rights.
In 2008, Nancy led the Center to establish the Law School Initiative to promote legal scholarship and teaching on reproductive health and human rights — an emerging body of transnational law not yet widely taught in U.S. law schools — through fellowships for recent law school graduates, a visiting scholars' program, curriculum development, conferences, and publications, with the goal of shaping the thinking of the next generation of lawyers, judges, and policymakers.
Following the Supreme Court's 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade, Nancy and the Center pivoted their focus to state-level litigation and ballot initiatives.
In the 2024 elections, voters in seven of ten states approved constitutional amendments to enshrine abortion rights, including a historic victory in Missouri — the first time voters in a state with a total abortion ban successfully amended their constitution to protect reproductive freedom. The Center for Reproductive Rights played a central role in supporting many of these efforts.
Nancy is also a respected voice in public discourse on reproductive rights, appearing in media outlets and publishing opinion pieces on the intersection of law, human rights, and reproductive freedom. She has provided expert testimony before Congress and various international human rights bodies, and holds adjunct teaching appointments at both NYU Law School and Columbia Law School, where she has taught courses in constitutional and human rights law.
She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and is the recipient of an honorary doctorate from Brown University, as well as numerous awards recognizing her contributions to human rights, women's equality, and reproductive freedom.
