Daniel Sheehan is a 1967 Honors Graduate of Harvard College. He took his Bachelor's Degree in the field of Government Studies and United States Foreign Policy studying under Dr. Henry Kissinger; James Schleshinger; David Riesman and Edwin Reischauer at Harvard. Mr. Sheehan wrote his Harvard Undergraduate Honors Thesis in the field of American Constitutional Law predicting, in terms of the history of the origins of Fifth Amendment, the United States Supreme Court decision in Miranda v. State of Arizona (mandating "warnings" as to one's constitutional rights upon one's arrest).
His thesis advisors were Paul Freund and Arthur Sutherland. Mr. Sheehan was Harvard College's Nominee for the Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University from New York State in 1967. Mr. Sheehan is a 1970 graduate of Harvard School of Law where he studied Constitutional Law under Lawrence Tribe; International Law under Louis Sohn; Jurisprudence under Lon Fuller; Property Law under W. Barton Leach; Anti-Trust Law under David Turner; Urban Policy under Adam Yarmolinski (Robert Kennedy's then prospective Secretary of Defense) and International Policy under Abe Chayes (Robert Kennedy's then prospective Secretary of State.) Mr. Sheehan served as an Editor of The Harvard Civil Rights - Civil Liberties Law Review and wrote Law Review notes and articles on such cases as Shuttlesworth v. The City of Birmingham and others. At Harvard Law School, Mr. Sheehan served as the Chief Research Assistant to Professor Jerome Cohen, the Chairman of the Department of International Law, in the preparation of Professor Cohen's book on The Illegality of The American War in Viet Nam.
Mr. Sheehan served under Prof. Milton Katz (then the President of the Association of International Jurists) as the Director of The Nigerian-Biafran Relief Commission which airlifted emergency food supplies into Nigeria.
Mr. Sheehan was selected by Professor Abe Chayes to serve as the Point Briefer to the United States Senate on The Cooper-Church Amendment authored by Professor Chayes to terminate all U.S. Congressional funding for the War in Viet Nam.
While still a law student at Harvard, Mr. Sheehan initiated, filed and litigated the cases of Eisenstadt v. Baird (winning the declaration of unconstitutionality against the Massachusetts State Anti-Birth Control Law for the Massachusetts Planned Parenthood League before the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston - this decision being cited in the United States Supreme Court Case of Roe v. Wade as one of the foundations of the reasoning in that case recognizing the right of women to freedom of choice) and In re: Pappas (asserting, for the first time in American jurisprudence, the First Amendment Right of Professional News Journalists to Protect The Identity of Confidential News Sources Against Compelled Government Disclosure before the Massachusetts State Supreme Court - winning the issuance of a Writ of Certiorari to the United States Supreme Court on this issue.)
Upon graduating from Harvard Law School, Mr. Sheehan was retained as Associate Litigation Counsel at the Wall Street law firm of First Amendment Attorney Floyd Abrams (Cahill, Gordon, Sonnett, Reindle
University of Wyoming Student Body v. University of Wyoming (successfully defending the First Amendment Right of the University of Wyoming Student Body To Select Motion Pictures for Student Events Free From Faculty Censorship);
In re: Dr. Rufus Lyman (successfully representing the Chairman of the Life Sciences Department of the University of Idaho in a Federal Civil Rights Act action for reinstatement of tenure after being dismissed for "insubordination" for speaking out publicly against the institution of an ad hoc committee to investigate public opponents of the President of Idaho State University);
In re: Starr (successfully defending 12 University of Colorado students against federal criminal charges filed by the United States Attorney in Nebraska under The Rap Brown Act [Interstate Travel To Aid
In re: Slaughterhouse Five (successfully representing, in a Federal Civil Rights Act action, a North Dakota senior high school English teacher in his demand for reinstatement to his public high school teaching post after being dismissed for assigning Slaughterhouse Five to his Senior English Class; and
Mr. Sheehan was the principle author of the Legal Briefs filed before the United States Supreme Court on behalf of the National American Civil Liberties Union in Mancari v. Morton (successfully asserting the right of the Federal Bureau of Indian Affairs to engage in racially-preferential hiring of Native Americans.)
Mr. Sheehan then served as Trial Counsel in the Boston law firm of Bailey & Alch (the law firm of Attorney F. Lee Bailey). There, Mr. Sheehan successfully participated in defending Attorney F. Lee Bailey against federal criminal charges in the case of United States v. Glenn W. Turner Chief Counsel in the case of Karen Silkwood v. The Kerr-McGee Nuclear Corporation (winning a 10.5 million judgment for the Estate of Karen Silkwood and a Federal Court Order declaring unconstitutional the federal financial "cap" imposed upon private civil tort recoveries for contamination damages caused by private nuclear facilities - thus ending the construction of all new private nuclear facilities in the United States);
Chief Counsel in The Three-Mile Island Litigation in Pennsylvania (winning a Federal Court Order stopping the release of radioactive effluents from the damaged Three-Mile Island Nuclear Facility into the Susquehanna River which had been already authorized by the Federal Atomic Energy Commission);
Chief Legal Counsel on The American Sanctuary Movement Case (winning a Federal Court Order declaring unconstitutional the secret Reagan/Bush Administration executive order banning the granting of Political Asylum Status to political refugees from El Salvador and Guatemala);
Chief Counsel in The Greensboro Civil Rights Case against the North Carolina Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party (winning a federal civil judgment against the North Carolina Ku Klux Klan, the American Nazi Party and the Greensboro Police Department under the Federal Civil Rights Act after the acquittal of 12 members of the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party for First Degree Murder of public anti-Klan demonstrators by an all-white North Carolina state jury);
Mr. Sheehan also served as Chief Legal Counsel for such Peace Activists as: Father Daniel Berrigan; Father Phillip Berrigan; Dick Gregory; Dr. Benjamin Spock and Southern Christian Leadership Council President David Abernathy; and as Chief Counsel on The Iran/Contra Civil Case against the Reagan-Bush Administration (forcing the appointment of Iran/Contra Special Counsel Lawrence Walsh - but failing to obtain any civil judgment against the Iran/Contra conspirators when George Bush, Sr. granted Presidential Pardons to the main conspirators and this case was dismissed by Miami's Chief Federal Judge).
Attorney Sheehan has been the Presenter of Advanced Seminars in Constitutional Law and American Politics at Harvard University; at Yale Law School and at Notre Dame School of Law.
He has taught Constitutional Law at Antioch School of Law in Washington, D.C.; Constitutional History and Legal Studies, at the undergraduate level, at the University of California at Santa Barbara as the Caesar Chavez Visiting Professor in 1994 and Political Philosophy at the University of California at Santa Cruz as the Adlai Stevenson Visiting Professor of Politics.
Mr. Sheehan also served as First Amendment Legal Counsel for Dr. John Mack, the Founder and Chairman of the Department of Clinical Psychology at Harvard Medical School, before the Harvard Faculty Committee in 1994 when Dr. Mack was called before the Committee to defend his publication of Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens. Since then, Mr. Sheehan has been featured as the keynote speaker at the International Convention of the Mutual UFO Network and the International UFO Congress.
Mr. Sheehan presently serves as General Counsel to The Disclosure Project, which has presented the sworn testimony to members of the United States Congress of two-dozen former high-ranking United States Military Officers and top-level Federal Employees of the Federal Aviation Agency and NASA attesting to their direct personal knowledge of the conscious cover up and concealment by United States Government agencies of information relating to the UFO issue and the potential existence of Extra-terrestrial Intelligence.
Mr. Sheehan also serves as General Counsel to the Institute or Cooperation Space, a U.S. citizens group dedicated to the banning of all weapons from space and to the banning of the development of any and all potentially offensive weapons to be used against a potential Extra-terrestrial civilization.
Most recently, Mr. Sheehan served as the Director of The Strategic Initiative To Identify The New Paradigm of President Mikhail Gorbachev's State of The World Forum in San Francisco.
Mr. Sheehan now lives in San Rafael, California with his two sons, Danny-Paul and Daegan, his adopted nephew Christopher and his wife of 23 years, Sara M. Nelson, the former National Labor Secretary of the National Organization for Women in Washington, D.C.
Mr. Sheehan is an active Member of the Bars of the State of New York and of the District of Columbia and is an active Member of the Federal Bars of the Southern District of New York and the District of Columbia. He has been admitted pro hac vicae to the Bars of the seventeen states in which Mr. Sheehan has conducted trials. These include: Pennsylvania; Georgia; Ohio; North Carolina; Nebraska; Florida; Idaho; Colorado; Wyoming; Oklahoma; North Dakota; South Dakota; Virginia; Texas; Mississippi and California.
Native American Children Rescue Fund
