When Mayor Bill de Blasio decided the much-maligned Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB) needed a major makeover, he turned to an attorney with a career-long history of taking on the establishment—both as an outsider and an insider.
Richard Emery, 68, is a founding partner of Emery Celli Brinckerhoff & Abady. He was a New York Civil Liberties Union staff attorney and director of the Institutional Legal Services Project in Washington state, representing detainees of juvenile and mental health facilities, before becoming a partner at Laneknau Kovner & Bickford. While there, he challenged the New York City Board of Estimate under the one-person, one-vote rule and won a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court decision.
