Getting Personal
For LAANE Honorary Board Member David Altschul, Activism Is a Lifelong Pursuit

LAANE Honorary Board member David Altschul has been an activist since his college days when he spent a summer working in Appalachia organizing communities that had endured the ravages of strip mining.

Asked what led to his commitment to social justice, Altschul explains, “It was part of the times that I grew up in. It was something I absorbed through the civil rights movement and through the Vietnam War.”

Altschul learned some important lessons from his formative work as a community organizer. “As a community, it’s not important to just achieve results—it is important to jumpstart a process.

“All the different experiences I have had promoting social justice, whether it was working in Appalachia or whether it was working and teaching on a reservation, reinforced my values.”

Altschul graduated from Amherst College in 1969. After a stint teaching with his wife, Margaret, on a Navajo Indian Reservation in Arizona, he attended Yale Law School where he studied at the same time as Bill and Hillary Clinton, Robert Reich, Lani Guinier, Clarence Thomas, John Bolton and Samuel Alito.

While studying law, Altschul was in charge of the legal services program on prison law, representing inmates at the Federal Correctional Institution in nearby Danbury, Connecticut.

Since 1980, Altschul has focused primarily on practicing law within the music industry and is currently a partner in Altschul & Olin, LLP. From 1980 to 2001, he served as General Counsel at Warner Bros Records Inc. and, for the last 7 years of his tenure there, as Vice Chairman of the company.

David has been married for over 37 years to Margaret, with whom he has four children. He also plays bassoon in a multi-generational orchestra in the Valley and is an avid landscape photographer.

Continuing to pursue activism alongside his professional responsibilities, Altschul not only serves on LAANE’s Honorary Board, but has been on the Board of Directors of People for the American Way, a national non-profit fighting for the preservation and advancement of progressive political and social values.

“I’m very concerned about the increase in disparity between the wealthy and the poor. To me, it is an abomination,” Altschul says. “The middle class is being squeezed out of existence. It is incumbent on all of us to strive for human equality. It’s just a sense of human obligation to your fellow human beings.”