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Theresa Amato (born March 1, 1964) is an American public advocate and political activist. Founder and first president of the Citizen Advocacy Center (Elmhurst, Illinois) which builds democracy for the 21st century. Amato served as first executive director of Citizen Works, an organization devoted to rebalancing the power between corporations and citizens. She was also the Director of its Fair Contracts Project. Amato is a manager of Amato PLLC, through which she advises nonprofits, foundations, and progressive candidates seeking office. Amato formerly served on the Council of Regents of Loyola University, Chicago, and continues to serve on the Advisory Board of the Loyola University, Chicago School of Law's Institute for Consumer Antitrust Studies.
In both 2000 and 2004, Amato served as the national presidential campaign manager and in-house counsel for Ralph Nader, who obtained the highest vote count in the United States for a third-party progressive candidate since 1924, and shepherded election reform efforts and litigation to open up the political system to competition. She also appears in the Sundance-selected and short-listed documentary about Ralph Nader, "An Unreasonable Man".
In 1997, Amato was named by The American Lawyer as one of the "future leaders of the legal profession" and one of the country's "45 young lawyers (under 45) whose vision and commitment are changing lives."
She was named in 1998 by Harvard Law School as a Wasserstein Public Interest Law Fellow. In 1999 and 2000, respectively, Amato received both the NYU Law and Loyola Law Chicago Public Service Awards.
In 2002, Harvard's Institute of Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government named Amato a Fellow. She led there a seminar entitled "Mobilizing for Justice: How to Take on the System and Make a Difference."
She has written for several publications on human rights, politics. Mother of two, she also writes about Italian-Americans and she has a regular column on parenting in Fra Noi. She teaches a course called "Advocating for Social Justice in Illinois" at Northeastern Illinois University. At Loyola Law School Chicago, she teaches the course "Community Lawyering and Civic Rights"(Fall 2013).
She is writing a book about public interest lawyering and the legal profession, to be published in 2014.
At NYU Law, Amato was the Root-Tilden Scholar from the 7th Circuit, the Senior Note and Comment Editor of the New York University Law Review, the recipient of the Orison S. Marden for first place oralist in Moot Court, and the recipient of the NYU Vanderbilt Medal for "extraordinary contributions to the School of Law".
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