Neil Thomas Proto

Neil Thomas Proto has served as an appellate lawyer in the U.S. Depart­ ment of Justice (1972–1977), as general counsel to the President’s Nuclear Safety Oversight Committee (1979–1981), and as a partner in Washington, D.C. law firms. His public service and private practice in law includes environmental, Native Hawaiian, urban, public lands, nuclear power, Native American, and constitutional litigation in the U.S. Supreme Court and courts of appeals.

Neil has taught at Yale University and at Georgetown University’s Mc­ Court School of Public Policy. He has written two other books: The Rights of My People: Liliuokalani’s Enduring Battle with the United States, 1890–1917 (2009) and Fearless: A. Bartlett Giamatti and the Battle for Fairness in Amer- ica (2019), which was a finalist in Biography for the Next Generation Indie Book Awards and received the Bronze Award in Biography by Foreword Re­ views. He has also authored numerous articles on baseball, space exploration, basketball, and the lives of Sacco and Vanzetti, T. E. Lawrence, and Ernest Shackleton. His play, The Reckoning: Pecora for the Public, on the causes of the 1929 stock market crash, premiered in Seattle (2016). His podcast, Downfall, a series on Giamatti, Pete Rose, and the fate of Baseball, premiered in 2021. He chaired New Haven’s yearlong commemoration of the seventy­fifth anniversary of the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti (2002) and co­wrote the book, with director Tony Giordano, for the adapted musical, The American Dream, which was performed at the Shubert Theatre in 2002. Neil is a member of the Dramatist Guild and also served on two New Haven theater boards, Long Wharf and the Shubert. He served on the board of the Franklin and Elea­ nor Roosevelt Institute, represented Protect Historic America pro bono in its successful effort to stop a Disney theme park in Northern Virginia, and is a Fellow in the Royal Geographical Society.

Neil graduated from Southern Connecticut State University and received his master’s degree from the Elliott School of International Relations at the George Washington University (GWU). He went on to receive his law de­gree at GWU. As a law student, he chaired Students Challenging Regulatory Agency Procedures (SCRAP), which successfully sued the United States in a case that reached the Supreme Court. Aspects of his life’s work and experience are held in collections at GWU, the University of Hawaii Law School, and Southern Connecticut State University. Neil, born in New Haven, Connecti­cut, resides in Washington, D.C.