Anne Erickson

President & CEO

Anne Erickson is President and CEO of the Empire Justice Center.  Anne works in the Albany office. 

Anne has been with Empire Justice since 1989.  She started as a policy analyst and legislative coordinator and became President when the organization’s director of over 30 years retired in 2000.  Anne has overseen the transformation of the organization, guiding its merger with the Public Interest Law Office of Rochester, expanding its White Plains office and opening a new office on Long Island.  She has put together a solid management team and has strategically combined the two organizations, aligning staff into five major practice groups: Consumer, Housing, C.A.S.H. and Community Development; Civil Rights, Education and Employment; Disability Benefits; Immigrants and Immigrant Rights; and Public Benefits, Health and Family. 

Prior to taking on her current leadership of the organization, Anne directed the legislative and policy advocacy work of the Greater Upstate Law Project.  Working closely with GULP’s staff attorneys, she helped develop and pursue an annual legislative agenda, focused primarily on health and welfare issues. 

Anne provides statewide leadership in efforts to strengthen and improve access to justice and to expand funding for civil legal services.  She is the former chair of the Equal Justice Commission and helped lead the LSC-driven state planning efforts in New York State.

Anne was an adjunct instructor for the Center for Women in Government’s graduate Fellowship program for many years, offering an intense course on the practical workings of state government, the development of the state budget and the interactions between and among the various branches of state government.

Before entering the world of advocacy, Anne was a journalist, working as the first legislative correspondent for WAMC-Northeast Public Radio, providing daily coverage of state government and politics and developing and hosting a weekly half-hour news show, The Legislative Gazette.

Anne is a graduate of SUNY New Paltz with a dual major in English/Journalism and Political Science.