Aviam Soifer (born 1948) is an American legal scholar who worked on high-profile matters for the American Civil Liberties Union and later served as dean of two American law schools, at the Boston College Law School from 1993 to 1998, and at the William S. Richardson School of Law at University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa from 2003 to 2020. He is an elected member of the American Law Institute. Early life and education Born in Worcester, Massachusetts to Samuel I. Soifer, Soifer attended the public schools of Holyoke, Massachusetts, and graduated from Theodore Roosevelt High School in Des Moines, Iowa. While an undergraduate student at Yale University, Soifer headed a student steering committee that invited female students to inhabit dorms vacated by the male students, to demonstrate that they would be comfortable in a coeducational environment. Soifer played a fundamental role in convincing then-Dean Kingman Brewster Jr. to commit to coeducation at Yale College. Soifer earned his Bachelor of Arts at Yale University in 1969, and a Master of Urban Studies at the same institution in 1972. In 1972, he also earned his Juris Doctor at Yale Law School, where he was an editor on the Yale Law Journal. Upon graduation, Soifer became a law clerk for Jon O. Newman. Career Academic career and litigation work Following his clerkship, Soifor became a professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law, and in 1974, was among the law professors there who voiced objecting to President Richard Nixon's appointment of Connecticut Governor Thomas Meskill to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Soifer "wrote briefs for the American Civil Liberties Union" and became "nationally renowned for legal crusades on behalf of civil rights and women's rights". He worked on the case of United States v. Progressive, Inc., defending the right of The Progressive magazine to publish an article purporting to reveal the "secret" of the hydrogen bomb, arguing that the information could not be deemed classified because it had been compiled from publicly available sources. At one point during a discussion of the case with reporters at ACLU headquarters by Soifer and Morton Halperin, "a Department of Energy official entered the small conference room... and asked for whatever was being handed out".<ref>"Scientist discovers more H-bomb how-to manuals", The Miami News, (May 23, 1979), p. 2-A.</ref> From 1976 until 1977, Soifer studied at Harvard University as a fellow. Soifer