Public interest lawyer, author, and Democratic congressional candidate Tom Geoghegan has been called “a true reformer,” “change you can believe in,” “a mensch,” “a man of unfailing integrity,” and “one of the greatest living progressives in America.” Throughout his lifetime of public service, Tom has been committed to one cause above all: bringing economic security to working Americans. He hopes to bring that same commitment to Congress, as representative of the men and women of the Fifth District of Illinois.

Thomas Howard Geoghegan (pronounced gae-gan) was born on January 22, 1949 in Cincinnati, Ohio, where his father was an insurance salesman and his grandfather was a local elected official. Tom, the eldest of six brothers in a close-knit Irish Catholic family, attended Cincinnati’s St. Xavier High School, a Jesuit institution. A fellow classmate there remembers Tom as being “a natural leader and scholar.”

Tom attended Harvard University, where he worked for the student newspaper, The Crimson. Though a strong opponent of the Vietnam War, Tom was one of only three students on the Crimson board who opposed that paper’s endorsement of the North Vietnamese National Liberation Front. Following his graduation there in 1971, Tom worked for two years as a contributing editor at The New Republic.

Despite his burgeoning career in journalism, Tom soon felt the call of public service, so he left his position at The New Republic to enter Harvard Law School (his roommate there was the future U.S. senator Charles Schumer). Upon his graduation in 1975, he began what was to be his life’s work, his career as a public interest attorney.

Tom’s first job out of law school was with the Legal Department of the United Mine Workers (UMW) in Washington D.C. As he recounts in the book he wrote about being a labor lawyer, Which Side Are You On? (which has been deemed a “classic”), among the cases he worked on was the strike by the Harlan County, Kentucky UMW local against Duke Power Company — a struggle which was portrayed in the famous documentary film, Harlan County, USA. The legal and political strategies Tom and his fellow lawyers devised played a key role in winning that strike.

From 1977 to 1979, Tom was a policy analyst for the U.S. Department of Energy. Working with Secretary James Schlesinger and Assistant Secretary for Policy Alvin Alm, Tom helped write and edit the groundbreaking National Energy Plan II, and he also drafted several energy-related Congressional proposals submitted by the Carter Administration. For his efforts, he earned an award for outstanding service as a Department of Energy employee.

In 1979, Tom moved to Chicago, where he joined the law firm headed by the man who would become his mentor, the legendary Leon Despres, who for many decades was Chicago’s most prominent reformer and progressive voice. At Despres, Schwartz, and Geoghegan, Tom has filed suits in a wide variety of public interest, labor, and employment law cases. He has successfully represented countless individuals who were discriminated against in the workplace due to their race, sex, disability, age, or sexual orientation, and he has sued employers who violated the Family and Medical Leave Act. He has also filed lawsuits to enforce child labor laws, expand voting rights, crack down on the payday loan industry, and require public health measures to stop the spread of tuberculosis among the homeless.

As a labor lawyer, Tom has fought for nurses, teachers, machinists, and other union members. He has also represented Teamsters for a Democratic Union and other union rank-and-file groups seeking to root out corruption and strengthen union democracy. His efforts have helped secure health care, pensions, and lost wages for thousands of working Americans. Among his most famous cases was Lumpkin, et al. v. International Harvester, a suit filed on behalf of 2,500 steelworkers who had been defrauded of their pensions. After a protracted seven-year battle, Tom succeeded in winning back the steelworkers’ lost pensions.

One of Tom’s most important recent cases has been his lawsuit against Advocate, a network of hospitals and health care providers in the greater Chicago area. Advocate had been charging uninsured and underinsured patients significantly higher rates than they were charging insurance companies for the exact same procedures. In the groundbreaking settlement Tom engineered, Advocate agreed not only to refund the patients it had overcharged, but also to provide free or discounted health care to all uninsured or underinsured patients.

Tom, who has long been on record as believing that Chicago is “America’s greatest city,” has lived in Illinois’s Fifth Congressional District for 30 years. He lives close enough to Wrigley Field, he says, that if he’s watching a Cubs game on TV with the sound turned down, and hears a hush from the nearby crowd at Wrigley, he knows there’s been a great play, and makes a point of watching the instant replay. A lifelong practicing Catholic, he attends weekly mass at St. Benedict’s. Tom, who is single, is also a voracious reader, an avid jogger, a lover of Chicago theater, and a fan of “comfort food”-type restaurants in Chicago’s Greektown and Little Italy.

Tom has been the recipient of numerous honors, including a Fullbright scholarship, a German Marshall grant, and fellowships at the American Academy in Berlin and the Institute of Politics at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

He has also enjoyed a distinguished career as a writer about politics and national affairs. In addition to The New Republic, Tom has written for The American Prospect, The Nation, Slate, The Chicago Tribune, and The New York Times. He has published five acclaimed books: Which Side Are You On?, which was nominated for National Book Critics Circle award; The Secret Lives of Citizens, a meditation on democracy and citizenship in contemporary America; two books, See You in Court and The Law in Shambles, which concern the courts, the rule of law, and the perils that deregulation has wrought; and In America’s Court, which looks at the American criminal justice system. He is currently at work on a book about European social democracy.

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Public interest lawyer, author, and Democratic congressional candidate Tom Geoghegan has been called “a true reformer,” “change you can believe in,” “a mensch,” “a man of unfailing integrity,” and “one of the greatest living progressives in America.” Throughout his lifetime of public service, Tom has been committed to one cause above all: bringing economic security to working Americans. He hopes to bring that same commitment to Congress, as representative of the men and women of the Fifth... (read more)