Alice O’Brien

General Counsel, National Education Association

Alice O’Brien serves as General Counsel to the National Education Association which represents three million educators who serve in our nation's schools and institutions of higher education.  She has served in that role since March of 2010.  Prior to that, Alice served as the Chief Counsel to the California Teachers Association (from 2008-10) and as an associate and then member of the labor law firm of Bredhoff & Kaiser PLLC.(from 1995 until 2008).

During her tenure at NEA, Alice has expanded the scope and reach of NEA’s legal advocacy to include efforts to counter censorship, book bans and anti-LGBTQ initiatives and to support educators targeted for teaching in ways that reflect and affirm the experiences of all of their students.  NEA’s legal work also includes efforts to fix the nation’s student debt programs to provide meaningful student debt relief, to protect public education by enforcing state constitutional commitments to public education and to challenge state laws that roll back and undermine worker rights including the rights of workers to have a voice at work through a union.  NEA also has redoubled its efforts to ensure that the federal courts reflect the best of our country including lawyers who have decided their lives to representing working people and unions.

Alice earned her B.A. from Yale University and her J.D. from the Georgetown University Law Center.