Team
Alan H. Scheiner is Senior Litigation Counsel at the National Jewish Advocacy Center, where he brings more than three decades of complex litigation experience — including over sixteen years in federal civil rights and constitutional law — to NJAC’s strategic impact work. Alan’s work at NJAC focuses on matters arising in New York City, where he lives, and federal civil rights litigation.
Before joining NJAC in January 2026, Mr. Scheiner served as Senior Counsel in the Special Federal Litigation Division of the New York City Law Department (2001–2007 and 2015–2025), defending the City of New York, the NYPD, the Department of Correction, and their officials and officers in federal civil rights actions under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. His docket included putative and certified class actions raising constitutional challenges to municipal statutes and policies, due-process claims, conditions-of-confinement matters, deadly- and excessive-force cases, and malicious-prosecution suits arising from reversed convictions.
Notable matters include lead-counsel work in Nunez v. City of New York, the federal consent-judgment litigation concerning Rikers Island, in which Mr. Scheiner secured a federal-preemption injunction suspending NYC Local Law 42; the successful defense of an emergency injunction in Baerga v. City of New York concerning a city initiative for involuntary psychiatric evaluations; and successful motions to dismiss in K.A. v. City of New York and King-Knight v. City of New York.
Earlier in his career, Mr. Scheiner practiced at Zuckerman Spaeder LLP, Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, and Levi Lubarsky & Feigenbaum LLP, handling white-collar criminal defense, securities, and complex commercial litigation, and first-chaired a successful pro bono federal jury trial defending an NYPD officer in a Section 1983 excessive-force case. From 2011 to 2013, he served as an adjunct Lecturer-in-Law at Columbia Law School. His writing has appeared in the Columbia Law Review, the New York Law Journal, and The Municipal Lawyer.
Mr. Scheiner earned his J.D. from Columbia Law School, where he was a member of the Columbia Law Review and a three-time Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar. He holds a B.A., magna cum laude, in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a Benjamin Franklin Scholar. He is admitted to the New York State Bar. He is the author of Judicial Assessment of Punitive Damages, the Seventh Amendment, and the Politics of Jury Power, 91 Colum. L. Rev. 142 (1991).