News & Commentary written by Tess Borden

Tess Borden is a Staff Attorney at the ACLU-NJ, where she works on a range of civil rights and civil liberties issues.

Prior to joining the ACLU-NJ, Tess was the Aryeh Neier Fellow at the National ACLU and Human Rights Watch (HRW). She is author of the 196-page ACLU/HRW report “Every 25 Seconds: The Human Toll of Criminalizing Drug Use in the United States.” Tess has also worked for the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, Netherlands, and HRW’s West Africa Division in Dakar, Senegal, as well as spending time before law school as an immigration paralegal.

Tess received her bachelor’s degree from Yale College, where she majored in French, and her law degree from Harvard Law School, where she was a member of the International Human Rights Clinic and an editor of the Harvard Human Rights Journal. She clerked for the Honorable George A. O’Toole, Jr. of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts.