New Intake Director at ACLU

In February, 2002, Mr. Dipak Patel began serving as Intake Director for the ACLU Foundation of Colorado, which handles statewide ACLU intakes. Dipak is a graduate of the University of Toronto and the Ohio State University College of Law. Having lived in Canada most of his life, Dipak was a stranger to the ACLU until he met his constitutional law professor David Goldberger. Professor Goldberger is best known for his ACLU case involving the First Amendment rights of Nazis in Skokie.

Dipak has interned at the Student Housing Legal Clinic in Columbus, Ohio and his activism includes volunteering as a pro bono Research Fellow during law school; working alongside migrant workers on an Ontario farm; campaigning for the Toronto Marxist-Leninist Party; and advocating for the suspension of a high school student involved in a hate crime against a Sikh student.

A dual citizen of Canada and the U.S., Dipak is "conducting a personal experiment to see how Americans exercise and guard their civil liberties," and is grateful for the opportunity to gain meaningful legal experience this soon out of law school.

Inspired by Gandhi and spurred by a personal tragedy involving "structural violence" in India, Dipak has chosen a path of social change within the institution of law. His commitment to U.S. Constitutional law comes from his need to effect daily change while learning how to use the constitution as a tool for longer term change. He wishes to draw on his work with the ACLU to ultimately effect social change in India, as the Constitution in India is modeled on that of the U.S.

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