Brenda Feigenshe gives both legal and practical business advice, where required
Program Titles
- The Expected Impact on the U.S. Supreme Court
- Role of the Producer in Motion Pictures
- Women and the law
- Privacy and Protection
- Constitutional issues raised by same-sex marriage
- May a State Rescind its Ratification of a Pending Constitutional Amendment?
- Making Deals with Cable Networks
- From Book to Film in an Era of Blockbusters and Tent Poles
- Entertainment and Sports Law in the New Economy
Brenda Feigen on subjects ranging from role of the producer in motion pictures and television to the respective roles of agents and attorneys to the contents of different kinds of entertainment-related contracts to deals for television and motion picture writers to contracts for authors with publishers.
Brenda Feigen is a entertainment and anti-discrimination attorney and she works with companies that need her services with respect to mergers and acquisitions with and of other entertainment companies or with respect to various types of litigation.
Feigen has handled matters involving motion picture, television, literary, music, copyright and other intellectual property areas.
Clients range from producers to rights owners, authors, writers, directors, actors, composers and singers.
She spent several years at the William Morris Agency where she was both a business affairs attorney and a motion picture agent. While at William Morris, she represented producers, writers and talent, such as Jane Alexander, Karen Allen, Loretta Swit and Mike Farrell.
Her practice has also been enhanced by her own experience as producer of a big-budget Hollywood movie, NAVY SEALS.
Feigen’s reputation as an activist in the Women’s Movement has caused her to expand her practice to include all aspects of anti-discrimination law, including gender discrimination, sexual harassment, sexual orientation, race, ethnic origin, disability and age discrimination cases, as well as harassment, wrongful termination and civil rights case, in general.
Some of the defendants with whom she has successfully settled matters for her clients include a nationwide insurance company, a national restaurant chain, the Defense Department, a large Hollywood film-processing company and a well-known law firm in a neighboring state. She is presently involved with a number of high-profile cases involving gender discrimination in Hollywood and elsewhere. She recently settled an important copyright case against a large New York publishing house.
Ms. Feigen co-founded the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project with now Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 1972 and then expanded its scope to include the Reproductive Freedom Rights Project, where her attention was focused not only on abortion rights but also, in three different federal class-action lawsuits, on the rights of poor, minority women to be free from unwanted sterilization.
She has litigated sex discrimination cases that involved both violations of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, as well as landmark constitutional cases. She sat at the counsel table as then Professor Ginsburg argued the landmark case, Frontiero v. Richardson, in which it was established that discrimination on the basis of gender would receive more than the cursory review it had previously garnered. That decision was the first in a long line of cases that culminated in a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision (written by Justice Ginsburg), holding that there must be an “extremely persuasive reason” for the existence of any gender discrimination by any government body or in any law or statute.
Feigen brought successful federal class action lawsuits against the Harvard Club of New York City, which had hitherto refused women graduates the right to become full members, and the New York City Board of Education which had routinely denied parental leaves of absence to all fathers but granted them to all mothers.
Ms. Feigen was elected National Vice President for Legislation of NOW and then went on to start the Women’s Action Alliance, the newsletter of which became MS. Magazine that she co-founded with Gloria Steinem.
She also was a co-founder of the National Women’s Political Caucus. Ms. Feigen lobbied intensively for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment and wrote an article for the Harvard Women’s Law Journal on the reasons that a state cannot rescind its prior ratification of a constitutional amendment, namely the ERA.
She has written numerous other articles about women in publications ranging from the anthology, Radical Lawyer (how badly women are treated in the legal profession) to Vogue Magazine ( e.g. the rights of actresses not to perform in the nude); from Ms. Magazine (women in sports) to The Village Voice (women at the Democratic Convention).
Ms. Feigen has written numerous articles on entertainment law, as well as women in the law. Ms. Feigen was a featured speaker at Harvard Law School’s Celebration 40 (celebrating the 40th anniversary of the first class of female graduates).
Ms. Feigen has lectured on the law of movies and television for the Practicing Law Institute, California Lawyers for the Arts and numerous other organizations.
Ms. Feigen is active in the arts as well as politics, having run for the Democratic nomination for State Senatorial seat.
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