Madelaine G. Altman

Madelaine Altman is a U.S. attorney based in California. She received her J.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, where she received certificates in International Law and Public Interest & Social Justice, as well as Pro Bono Honors. Her focus was on international human rights law, and she participated in both the Berkeley Journal of International Law and the International Human Rights Law Clinic. As a clinical student, she was tasked with evaluating international norms regarding privacy rights, with the goal of understanding how this developing area of law applied to State surveillance of human rights defenders.  This work was submitted as part of her client’s domestic and international human rights litigation. She additionally spent an academic year serving as a research assistant to Pablo de Greiff, one of the Commissioners on the International Independent Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine. She conducted both English- and Russian-language open-source investigations into the attacks against civil society actors in Russia, as well as the legislative changes implemented by the Russian Federation to oppress dissent and destroy media freedom.

​

Prior to joining the G37 Centre, Madelaine was a judicial law clerk to Chief Judge Marjorie K. Allard at the Alaska Court of Appeals, and a Staff Attorney on the Criminal Central Staff at the Supreme Court of California. At both positions, she worked exclusively on criminal appeals, and is well-versed in pertinent criminal law in Alaska, California, and U.S. federal jurisdictions. Prior to law school, Madelaine obtained undergraduate degrees in Psychology and Slavic Languages & Literatures from Stanford University, and additionally holds a Master’s degree from the Stanford Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies. Her work at Stanford focused on the intersection between psychology and Russian studies, and in her Master’s thesis, she examined how the Soviet Union committed human rights violations against political dissidents through its use of sham psychiatric diagnoses. She spent the year before law school on a Fulbright Research Award in Kazan, Russia, studying the effects of culture on schizophrenia symptoms. She speaks conversationally fluent Russian, and is learning Spanish.