The Green Party of New Jersey Bruce Afran for Senate Updated September 03, 2005

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BRUCE AFRAN FOR SENATE ! ! !

From the Candidate:

I stand for the progressive principles that have been gradually abandoned (and eroded) by the Democratic Party in the fields of environmental protection, anti-trust regulation, social justice and individual rights and liberties.

Ours will be a campaign opposed to the spread of the death penalty in the U.S. and the increasing diminishment of civil liberties in our criminal justice system.  We will call for a national ban (not simply a moratorium) on the use of this barbaric penalty.  We will campaign against the homogenization of American culture caused by the seemingly endless merger of corporate behemoths and the marketing exploitation of young Americans.  We will highlight the diminished respect for learning and education permeating our society, fostered to a great extent by the low-grade entertainment
offered up by our media conglomerates.

We will end the War on Drugs, which has increasingly become a war against our children and has created a police state in many of our cities.  We will demand a change in the growing merger of Hollywood and the organs of government and politics.

We will challenge the wisdom of unregulated trade with dictatorships of all stripes and demand that foreign governments respect human rights and the principles of due process if they are to profit by our commerce.  We will demand meaningful reform in the repression perpetrated by China if that
government is to continue to benefit from our trade.  A new call must go forth for the enhancement of the civil rights and equality of Americans of all backgrounds and to demand again the social justice that has receded from our politics.

This will be a campaign that will challenge the two-party system and provide the competition that has disappeared as the two major parties have moved toward a political monopoly.  Please join with us in this effort to build a political structure that responds to the needs of citizens.  Let us work to
create a public policy that answers to the public need.  Together we can renew America's democratic spirit and the ideal of true political competition.

Also, please send this message on to others you think might be supportive of or interested in hearing about the alternative we are presenting this year.  Encourage them to join the campaign to put Bruce Afran in New Jersey's U.S. Senate seat, Ralph Nader in the White House, and to build a new force in Congress -- through NJ Green Campaign 2000.

Life and Career

Bruce I. Afran was graduated from Brooklyn Law School in 1985 and from the State University of New York at Binghamton with a degree in history in 1982. Since entering the bar in 1986 he has practiced commercial and constitutional law figuring prominently in leading cases in New Jersey concerning voting rights, immigrant rights and domestic relations law. In other fields, he has consulted on matters involving international human rights law, pensions and securities law.

As a well-known civil rights lawyer in New Jersey, Mr. Afran has argued many cases that established or led to major changes in State law and business practices. Among his more prominent legal actions, Mr. Afran argued before the New Jersey Supreme Court in a highly-publicized domestic relations case, Pascale v. Pascale, in which he argued that divorced fathers active in their children’s upbringing should be entitled to spend child support monies directly on the children. This case led to a revision of the child support guidelines in 1996 to enable non-custodial parents to retain child support funds to spend directly on the couple’s children and was a major step toward equitable legal treatment for non-custodial parents in New Jersey’s family courts.

In August 1999, Mr. Afran obtained a major court victory in the U.S. District Court, when Chief Judge Anne Thompson upheld the right of African-American foster children to sue the State and its Division of Youth and Family Services (DYFS) for adoption discrimination.  In that action, Means v. State of New Jersey, a foster child sued the State and DYFS for a policy in which it prevented or discouraged African-American children from being adopted by white families. The plaintiffs, represented by Mr. Afran, argued that such practices discriminated against African-American foster children delaying their adoption for years and, often, permanently.

Chief Judge Thompson held that such practices violated the rights of African-American children under the Equal Protection provisions of the U.S. Constitution and would constitute illegal, race-based discrimination under federal civil rights statutes. This is the first reported decision in the United States is known to uphold a right of action by foster children to claim illegal discrimination against a state adoption agency.

Mr. Afran has been particularly active in the defense of immigrant rights, particularly in the field of employment law, arguing numerous cases seeking to uphold immigrants’ claims to protection under state wage and hour laws and in an effort to challenge state laws denying illegal immigrants the right to driving licenses. He prosecuted a well-publicized action against the Princeton Medical Center, Perez v. Medical Center at Princeton, on behalf of a Mexican woman who was denied access to an interpreter during a major medical procedure. In the course of that litigation, the Princeton Medical Center hired its first full-time Spanish interpreter, setting a language rights precedent for hospitals throughout New Jersey.

He has also been counsel in a variety of other civil rights cases, including an action against the Hun School, a prestigious private academy in Princeton, which terminated an employee who lived with his unmarried domestic partner and their children. This action, which again received extensive publicity in central New Jersey was a major effort in the fight to protect the employment rights of unmarried couples.

In the field of elections law, Mr. Afran successfully overturned a New Jersey statute requiring denying residents of the State the right to vote if they moved within the State less than 30 days before an election. That 1990 decision, Afran v. State of New Jersey, fundamentally altered the residency requirements for voting in New Jersey and is a frequently cited precedent in elections law.

In 1998, he successfully argued that Carl Mayer, who was defeated in the Democratic primary for Congress in the 12^th Congressional District, should be permitted to remain on the ballot as an independent Green Party candidate in an adjoining district. That action, Verniero v. Mayer, gave rise to widespread public attention to the Green Party as an emerging political entity. He has represented a variety of political parties and is often called on to consult in election law and related matters.

Mr. Afran is also active as a consultant in other fields, notably international human rights law, where has represented the Chief Rabbi of Poland in an action against the former communist regime for violation of his protected rights under international treaties and the United Nations charter.

Last summer, he was an outspoken critic of the approval by the New Jersey State Senate of former Attorney General Peter Verniero’s nomination to the New Jersey Supreme Court.  In an article published in the Trenton Times, Mr. Afran strongly condemned the Verniero appointment on the ground that as Attorney General, Peter Verniero failed to adequately protect the rights of African-American drivers from illegal discrimination by the New Jersey State Police, which are now under federal supervision because of race-based discrimination.  Mr. Afran was one of the few lawyers in the State to openly condemn Justice Verniero’s appointment.

Mr. Afran lives in Princeton with his wife Joyce, a professor of family medicine at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, and their two children, Samuel, 7, and Tobi, 5. In the past three years he has been active in the Green Party as a legal advisor and is a part of a small group of attorneys advising Ralph Nader in his 2000 Presidential campaign.