About Danny Sheehan

Early life and education

Danny was born on April 9, 1945 in Glens Falls, New York. He studied American government at Harvard College, graduating with honors in 1967 with a thesis on the historical origins of the Fifth Amendment. At Harvard Law School, where he earned his J.D. in 1970, he was co-editor of the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review and chief research assistant to international law scholar Jerome Cohen. From 1973 to 1975 he pursued graduate study in comparative social ethics at Harvard Divinity School.

As a student he co-founded Roxbury Summer, a 1965 Boston Archdiocese project that turned unused Catholic schools into childcare and job-training centers, and in 1968 he directed the Biafran Relief Commission’s emergency airlift of food and supplies during the Nigerian Civil War. He was also one of five briefers to the U.S. Senate on the Cooper-Church Amendment to end funding for the Vietnam War.

First Amendment and civil liberties lawyer

From 1970 to 1972 Danny was an associate First Amendment counsel at Cahill, Gordon, Sonnett, Reindel & Ohl in New York, where he worked on the Pentagon Papers case with The New York Times’ legal team. In the same years he was pro bono associate counsel in the Panther 21 trial and legal counsel to inmates after the Attica uprising. With F. Lee Bailey’s Boston firm he served as special counsel in the Watergate burglary case, and in 1974 he was chief trial counsel for the ACLU’s office for the Rocky Mountain states, where he took part in the Wounded Knee trials. More on his 1970s cases.

The Jesuit Office and the Christic Institute

From 1975 to 1985 Danny was counsel to the U.S. Jesuit Order’s National Office of Social Ministries in Washington, D.C. In 1976 he filed the Karen Silkwood case against Kerr-McGee, and in 1980 he co-founded the Christic Institute with Sara Nelson and Fr. William Davis, an interfaith public-interest law center that combined investigation, litigation and public education.

As Christic’s chief counsel he led legal work after Three Mile Island, the Greensboro civil rights case, the defense of Sanctuary Movement workers and Avirgan v. Hull, the 1986 suit over the covert network behind the Contra supply operation that soon came to light in the Iran-Contra affair. In 1986 he was a visiting professor of constitutional law at Antioch School of Law.

The Romero Institute

Since 1993 Danny has been President and General Counsel of the Romero Institute in Santa Cruz, California, the Christic Institute’s successor. He was the Cesar Chavez Visiting Professor at UC Santa Barbara in 1993 and 1994, and in 1999 he directed a strategic initiative on the new paradigm for Mikhail Gorbachev’s State of the World Forum in San Francisco.

The Romero Institute launched the Lakota People’s Law Project in 2004. As its chief counsel, Danny worked on enforcement of the Indian Child Welfare Act and represented Standing Rock water protector Chase Iron Eyes, whose felony charges were dropped in 2018.

Teacher

From 2012 to 2019 Danny taught recurring lecture courses at UC Santa Cruz’s Cowell College on his own cases, the JFK assassination, natural law and the Constitution, the history of American covert operations, and climate change and Standing Rock. He has presented seminars on constitutional law and American politics at Harvard, Yale Law School and Notre Dame. Watch the lectures.

UAP disclosure

By Danny’s account, his work on the subject began in the late 1970s, when he served as a special consultant to a Library of Congress study on extraterrestrial intelligence requested during the Carter administration. He later served as counsel to Harvard psychiatrist John Mack before a Harvard faculty committee reviewing Mack’s research, as general counsel to Steven Greer’s Disclosure Project, and as general counsel to the Institute for Cooperation in Space. In 2021 he represented former Pentagon official Luis Elizondo.

In 2023 he and Sara Nelson launched the New Paradigm Institute as an initiative of the Romero Institute, and he serves as its Chief Counsel. He hosts Full Disclosure with Danny Sheehan with SpectreVision Radio. More on his work for disclosure.

Author

His memoir, The People’s Advocate: The Life and Legal History of America’s Most Fearless Public Interest Lawyer, was published by Counterpoint Press in 2013.

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Education

• Harvard College, A.B. in American Government with honors, 1967
• Harvard Law School, J.D., 1970
• Harvard Divinity School, graduate study in comparative social ethics, 1973 to 1975

Bar admissions

Member of the bars of New York and the District of Columbia, and admitted pro hac vice in courts in many other states.