Elizabeth Holtzman

Elizabeth Holtzman concentrates her practice in government relations at the federal, state and local levels, and in litigation. She joined Herrick, Feinstein after twenty years in government. She served for eight years as a U.S. Congresswoman and won national attention for her role on the House Judiciary committee during Watergate. She was subsequently elected District Attorney of Kings County (Brooklyn), the only woman ever elected DA in NYC, serving for eight years. As DA, she argued successfully before the United States Supreme Court, and pioneered new strategies for the prosecution of rape and environmental crimes. She led the effort to overturn law allowing blacks to be removed from juries. Liz was also the only woman ever elected Comptroller of New York City. She invested the city’s public funds in building hundreds of units of affordable housing. A bill she authored as comptroller was recently signed in to law 12 years later. It holds gun manufacturers liable for the injuries caused by illegal guns. Liz was appointed, by President Clinton, to the Nazi and Japanese Imperial War Criminal Records Interagency Working Group, which is overseeing the declassification of the U.S. government’s secret Nazi war crimes files.