Harold Cassidy has engaged in a broad variety of litigation, both trial and appellate, in his 42 years in the private practice of law. The New Jersey Supreme Court designated him a Certified Civil Trial Attorney and he is a past member of the Board of Governors of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, New Jersey. He was selected by the New Jersey Governor to serve as a member of the New Jersey Bioethics Commission, and was a Delegate to the American Bar Association convention on Life, Death and the Law. In 2017 he was selected by Who’s Who as one of the Top One Hundred Lawyers in North America, and was invited to be a member of the prestigious, invitation only, “National Trial Lawyers: Top 100.” For his achievements in the law he was selected Person of the Week by the ABC World News with Peter Jennings.

A prominent publishing house published a book on the one hundred most important legal cases of the twentieth century, and two of Mr. Cassidy’s cases were listed and discussed. No attorney had more. He also worked on post-judgment proceedings on a third case listed.

Mr. Cassidy has litigated numerous cases of public importance in a variety of areas of practice.

In the area of criminal law, he litigated the New Jersey Supreme Court’s leading case establishing the right of one accused of a crime to have independent legal counsel. He litigated the first case in the nation in which an Appellate Court established the right of a defendant to require the state to hold a line-up which would include specifically identified non-defendants. Mr. Cassidy was also a member of the legal team which won Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, a well-known professional boxer wrongfully convicted of triple murder, his freedom in court proceedings which lasted nineteen years.

In the area of medical legal and tort law, Mr. Cassidy handled more than a thousand cases. Mr. Cassidy obtained the first jury verdict, in New Jersey, in which a jury returned a verdict against a doctor and nurses for the suicide death of their psychiatric patient. He was counsel in the New Jersey case that created a new rule of law tolling the statute of limitations in cases where a minor was sexually assaulted and the resultant psychological injury prevented the victim from timely asserting her rights. He obtained significant recoveries in novel cases, such as the Hudson County Jail Fire Case, the Breach of Security Case at Rutgers University, and products claims against General Motors.

In the area of commercial litigation, Mr. Cassidy successfully defended, on behalf of the Federal Government’s banking regulatory agency, the FDIC, the first post-bank closing due process hearing in the history of New Jersey. He also was counsel in the case in which the New Jersey Supreme Court struck down state fees imposed upon Federal agencies as violative of Federal Law and the Supremacy Clause.

Perhaps, most significantly, Harold Cassidy is considered the leading and most accomplished attorney in the nation as a defender of the rights of pregnant mothers. He secured the return of children to their mothers where the mothers’ surrender of their rights were uninformed or involuntary. He was Chief Counsel in the famous Baby M case, the first case in the United States to strike down surrogate parenting contracts as illegal, unenforceable, against public policy and exploitive of women. In 2009, he successfully litigated the first contested “gestational” surrogacy case in New Jersey, where the mother who carried the child was not genetically related to the child, obtaining a decision that the woman who carried the child was the legal mother, that the contract was unenforceable, violative of public policy, exploitive of women, and her consent for adoption, resulting from compulsion of the contract, was void. He currently is litigating the constitutionality of surrogacy enabling statutes as violative of the constitutional rights of the children and the surrogate mothers. He has successfully sued a surrogacy broker who violated the rights of the surrogate mother.

Mr. Cassidy has devoted part of his practice to protecting the rights of pregnant mothers where abortion providers have violated their rights and subjected them to procedures without obtaining informed and voluntary consent. Mr. Cassidy established important precedent which held that a first trimester abortion involved the death of a family member, and also successfully sued an abortion doctor who performed an abortion which was coerced.

Harold Cassidy is now widely consulted by various state legislatures for his legal expertise in the area of mothers’ rights and abortion law. He has assisted in drafting such legislation and has successfully defended them.

Mr. Cassidy obtained a cutting edge, landmark decision, from an en banc Court of the United States Court of Appeals, that it is constitutional for a state to require an abortion doctor to disclose that an “abortion terminates the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being.” He obtained a separate landmark opinion from a second en banc panel of the US Court of Appeals that upheld the statutory requirement that an abortion doctor disclose to a pregnant mother that an abortion will place her at increased risk for suicide ideation and suicide.

In a 2010 Columbia Law Review article written by Harvard Law School Professor, Jeannie Suk, “The Trajectory of Trauma: Bodies and Minds of Abortion Discourse,” Professor Suk states:

In January 2011, the national magazine, Mother Jones,wrote:

In one of his recent books, “Challenging Nature,” Lee M. Silver, an accomplished Molecular Biologist who was among the first scientists to discover some of the genes that regulate gene expression, who was an expert on the opposition side of two of Cassidy’s cases, wrote:

Mr. Cassidy has lectured widely on the rights of women including addresses at the Harvard Law Forum, Yale Law School and Princeton University. He has appeared on National and International television, including appearances on Nightline, The David Brinkley Show, and The David Frost Show in London.