Areas of Focus
Jonathan Manes is an attorney in the MacArthur Justice Center’s Illinois Office where his practice focuses on civil rights violations that flow from surveillance, police technologies, mass incarceration, and national security policies. He previously led MJC’s work on voting rights. He is an expert in government transparency, free speech, and press freedom, and teaches at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law on those topics.
At the MacArthur Justice Center, Mr. Manes succeeded in winning the freedom of an immigrant detained indefinitely under a never-before-used provision of the PATRIOT Act. During the 2020 election cycle, he pursued litigation to ensure that both mail and in-person voting were safe and accessible to all. He currently leads the Illinois Office’s work on surveillance technologies, including the ShotSpotter gunshot detection system.
Before joining the MacArthur Justice Center, Mr. Manes was a professor at the University at Buffalo School of Law, where he directed of the Civil Liberties & Transparency Clinic. Under his supervision, the clinic litigated and won a number of victories, including for local activists exposing concealed suicide attempts at county jails and for millions of veterans whose private data had been left unprotected by the Department of Defense. He previously served as a clinical lecturer at Yale Law School’s Media Freedom & Information Access Clinic representing journalists and non-profits in First Amendment and transparency cases. His work at Yale included successful lawsuits demanding transparency about dragnet national security surveillance, novel police technologies, and harsh conditions faced by Muslim prisoners in federal custody.
Earlier in his career, as a Gibbons Fellow in New Jersey, he won an important appellate victory establishing the First Amendment right to record police officers on the streets. He also developed successful litigation challenging the discriminatory surveillance of Muslim communities by the NYPD. He began his legal career as a fellow in the ACLU’s National Security Project working on litigation challenging drone strikes/targeted killings, military detention, and discriminatory law enforcement practices.
Mr. Manes has published scholarly work on the conflicts between secrecy and democratic accountability, focusing on surveillance technologies and national security. His academic writing has appeared in the Georgetown Law Journal, Berkeley Technology Law Journal, and Yale Law Journal Forum.
Mr. Manes is a co-founder and member of the steering committee of the Free Expression Legal Network. He previously served on the board of the New York Civil Liberties Union. He clerked for Justice Morris J. Fish of the Supreme Court of Canada. He graduated from Yale Law School, the London School of Economics (M.Sc. Philosophy of the Social Sciences), and Columbia University (B.A. Biochemistry; Philosophy of Science).