About
Liam Brennan
An Advocate for Justice
Liam has dedicated his career to economic, racial, and social justice. Having grown up in working class neighborhoods and as part of a large extended immigrant family, Liam learned early on how the government could both help and hinder families trying to make ends meet. And he resolved to be a catalyst for change.
During law school, Liam interned with Junta for Progressive Action (“Junta”) providing free legal services to low-income residents. During that time, he was a researcher that helped support Junta’s and Unidad Latina en Acción’s (“ULA”) “City to Model'' proposal that produced nationally-recognized pro-immigrant municipal reforms.
After law school, Liam joined the Department of Justice, where he took on corrupt hedge fund managers, debt collectors, Wall Street bankers, and Connecticut’s former governor. Liam also worked in a drug rehabilitation court to help justice-involved individuals reduce their time on supervised release. After the massacre at Mother Emanuel church, he was part of a small team that brought the then-national Chair of the NAACP, Rosslyn Brock, and then-director of the FBI, James Comey, to New Haven to discuss community and police relations with local residents.
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Liam left the Department of Justice to become a legal aid attorney. At New Haven Legal Assistance Association, he worked closely with the Dixwell Community Management Team and the Community Placemaking Engagement Network around economic issues. He also assisted Mothers and Others for Justice to form the Room for All Coalition that developed a series of affordable housing proposals. He then became the executive director of the Connecticut Veterans Legal Center (“CVLC”), where he helped expand state-wide services to low-income veterans recovering from homelessness and mental illness. While at CVLC, Liam oversaw an increase in services to survivors of military sexual assault and the production of two national reports on gender and racial disparities in Congressional nominations to the military service academies.
In the wake of the 2020 push for criminal justice reform, Liam was recruited to become the first Inspector General in Hartford. He currently serves in that position, where he investigates allegations of police misconduct.
A Skilled Administrator
While working at the Department of Justice, Liam was appointed to be the head of the federal Public Corruption Task Force. In that role, he oversaw the coordination of all federal public corruption cases in the state of Connecticut. As an Assistant United States Attorney, Liam successfully led numerous fraud and corruption cases against the most well-financed and powerful attorneys in the country.
When Liam took over as executive director of CVLC, the organization faced a six-figure deficit, had the lowest paid legal aid attorneys in the state, and did not provide the family of staff members with employer-subsidized healthcare. By the time he left CVLC, the organization had grown, expanding services throughout Connecticut, pegged attorney’s salaries to the state median for legal aid practitioners, and provided healthcare for the staff’s families. It had also turned the organizational deficit into a six-figure surplus.
As Inspector General, Liam has been the first to implement a number of the criminal justice reform provisions found in the police accountability acts of 2020 and 2021. He designed and developed the first subpoenas for a civilian review board. He successfully defended them in court and worked with the state judicial branch to develop procedures to administer the new reforms.
A Committed Member of the Community
Liam met his wife, Rebecca Borné, in New Haven and together they are raising four children. All four are New Haven Public School students and Liam has been active in his children’s school and district-wide school advocacy.
Liam has been a board member of Junta for Progressive Action, Neighborhood Housing Services of New Haven, Elm City Cycling, and the Community Placemaking Engagement Network. Prior to law school, Liam spent two years as an associate with Holy Cross Associates, a Catholic volunteer organization, working in Los Andes, Chile.
You can often find him riding his bike (usually with a kid or two in tow) in and around the Elm City.
