After graduating from Harvard Law School, Cohen clerked for Judge
Abner Mikva on the federal
D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and then served as a lawyer for the
Southern Poverty Law Center in
Montgomery, Alabama. Cohen subsequently worked as a staff attorney for the
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in
New York City. While at the ACLU, he focused on school finance and
educational equity issues and was part of the legal team that brought an Alabama state court class action in 1991, claiming that the public school system violated
the state constitution by failing to provide an equitable, adequate or "liberal" education. In 1993 the state courts ruled in favor of the ACLU and the children plaintiffs in
Harper v. Hunt, finding that poor schools were not equitably funded. During his tenure as Alabama attorney general,
Jeff Sessions, later President
Donald Trump's attorney general of the United States, fought against the findings of the Alabama courts. During his tenure at the
Times, from 2002 until 2010, Cohen's editorials focused on tech and legal affairs. After leaving
The New York Times, he became a lecturer in law at
Yale Law School and a fellow at the
Yale Information Society Project, teaching courses in media and internet law. Beginning in 2011, Cohen also served as special policy advisor to New York State Governor
Andrew Cuomo. In 2014 Cohen joined New York City
Mayor de Blasio's administration as chief speechwriter. In 2015 he moved to the mayor's Center for Economic Opportunity, as a special policy advisor. Along with
Elizabeth Taylor, the literary editor of the
Chicago Tribune and Cohen's co-author of
American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley, His Battle for Chicago and the Nation, Cohen is also co-editor of
The National Book Review. In 2017, Cohen was a
Pulitzer Prize juror in the category of criticism and in 2018 he was a juror in the category of Feature Writing. Cohen is the author of five books. The most recent, ''Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Court's Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America'', argues that the United States Supreme Court turned away from protecting the poor and weak and from advancing a more just and equal society across broad and diverse areas of law (education, poverty, campaign finance, democracy, workers' rights, corporations, and criminal justice), reversing the course the law had been on under the jurisprudence of the
Warren Court. This reversal occurred in the aftermath of Chief Justice
Earl Warren's retirement and President
Richard Nixon's successful bid—deemed a ruthless and baseless "squeeze play" by Cohen—to force liberal Justice
Abe Fortas off the court by threatening federal investigations of Fortas and his wife. Nixon went on to appoint four conservative justices (new Chief Justice
Warren Burger, future Chief Justice
William Rehnquist, then-conservative Associate Justice
Harry Blackmun, and Associate Justice
Lewis Powell). Calling the book "impressive and necessary",
The New York Times praises Cohen's "sweeping review" as showing that "the Court has repeatedly engaged in judicial activism
against the poor", aggressively exacerbating income inequality in the United States. "Cohen sums up the result of fifty years of jurisprudence in the areas he explores, writing that 'the post-1969 Court has been working unrelentingly to protect the wealthy and powerful, and to make [the United States] more hierarchical and exclusionary - and it has been succeeding. When it comes to the law, and its many consequences for society, we are all living in Nixon's America now. In April 2023, in response to reports of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas's failure to disclose a series of luxurious presents and benefits he received from conservative activist billionaire
Harlan Crow, Cohen penned an Op Ed in The New York Times, drawing an unfavorable comparison to the bipartisan agreement on ethics that had marked the resignation of Justice
Abe Fortas from the Supreme Court in 1969. Cohen's previous book,
Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck, was named to the longlist for the 2016
National Book Award, and is slated to be made into an Amazon film,
Unfit, starring
Dakota Johnson. ==Books==