Founded in 1937 the National Lawyers Guild
was the nation's first racially integrated bar association. The first
Guild lawyers supported President Roosevelt's New Deal, assisted the
emerging industrial labor movement, and opposed the racial segregation
policies of the American Bar Association and the larger society. During
its 65 year history, the NLG has been an important part of the American
people's struggle for real democracy, for economic and social justice,
and against oppression and discrimination based on race, ethnicity,
immigration status, class, gender or sexual orientation. Consistent
with its commitment to ensuring fairness and equality for all people,
law students, non-lawyer legal workers and inmate legal experts are
full members. The Guild elected its first African-American president in
the early 1950s and its first female president in the 1960s. The first
legal worker president was elected in 1996.
In the 1930s, NLG lawyers helped organize the United Auto
Workers (UAW), the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and
supported the New Deal in the face of determined ABA opposition. In the
1940s, Guild lawyers fought against fascists in the Spanish Civil War
and WW II, and helped prosecute Nazis at Nuremburg. Guild lawyers
fought racial discrimination in cases such as Hansberry v. Lee, the case that struck down segregationist Jim
Crow laws in Chicago and entered our culture as Lorraine Hansberry "A
Raisin in the Sun." The Guild was one of the non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) selected by the U.S. Government to officially
represent the American people at the founding of the U.N. in 1945.
In the late 1940s and 50s, Guild members founded the first
national plaintiffs personal injury bar association that became the
American Trial Lawyers Association (ATLA), and pioneered the storefront
law offices for low-income clients that became the model for the
community-based offices of the Legal Services Corporation. During the McCarthy era, Guild members represented the Hollywood Ten, the
Rosenbergs, and thousands of victims of the anti-communist hysteria.
Unlike all other national civil liberties groups and bar associations,
the Guild refused to require loyalty oaths of its members and the NLG
was unjustly labeled subversive by the government. The Justice
Department admitted the charges were baseless after ten years of
federal litigation.
In the 1960s, the Guild set up offices in the South and organized
thousands of volunteer lawyers and law students to provide legal
support for the Civil Rights Movement long before the federal
government was involved. Guild members represented the families of
murdered civil rights activists Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman, who were
assassinated by local law enforcement members of the Ku Klux Klan.
Guild-initiated lawsuits brought the Kennedy Justice Department
directly into the Civil Rights struggle in Mississippi and challenged
the seating of the all-white Mississippi delegation at the 1964
Democratic Convention. Guild lawyers defended thousands of civil rights
activists who were arrested for exercising basic rights and established
new federal constitutional protections in ground-breaking Supreme Court
cases such as: Dombrowski v. Pfister, which enjoined thousands of racially-motivated state court criminal prosecutions;
Goldberg v. Kelly, the case that established the concept of entitlements to social benefits which require Due Process protections; and,
Monell v. Dept. of Public Services, which held municipalities liable for brutal police employees.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Guild members represented Vietnam
War draft resisters, antiwar activists and the Chicago 7, after the
1968 Chicago Convention. NLG offices in Asia represented GIs who
opposed the war. Guild members argued U.S. v. U.S. District Court, the Supreme Court case that
established that Nixon could not ignore the Bill of Rights in the name
of "national security" and led to the Watergate hearings and Nixon's
resignation. Guild members defended FBI-targeted members of the Black
Panther Party, the American Indian Movement, the Puerto Rican
independence movement and helped expose illegal F.B.I and C.I.A.
surveillance, infiltration and disruption tactics (called COINTELPRO),
that the U.S. Senate "Church Commission" hearings detailed in 1975-76
and which led to enactment of the Freedom of Information Act and other
specific limitations on federal investigative power. The NLG supported
self-determination for Palestine, opposed apartheid in South Africa, at
a time when the U.S. Government still called Nelson Mandella a "terrorist" and began the fight against the blockade of Cuba. During
this period, NLG members founded other important civil rights and human
rights institutions, such as the Center Constitutional Rights, the
National Conference of Black Lawyers, the Meiklejohn Civil Liberties
Institute in Berkeley, San Francisco's New College School of Law and
the Peoples Law School in Los Angeles.
In the 1980s, the Guild pioneered the "necessity defense" and
used international law in support of the anti-nuclear movement and
began challenging the use nuclear weapons under international law. This
eventually resulted in the World Court declaration that nuclear weapons
violate international law in a case argued by Guild lawyers more than a
decade later. The NLG National Immigration Project began working
systematically on immigration issues, spurred by the need to represent
Central American refugees and asylum activists fleeing U.S. sponsored terror in Nicaragua and El Salvador. The Guild organized People's Tribunal to expose the illegality of U.S. intervention in Central
America that even more widely known as the "Iran-Contra" scandal. The
Guild prevailed in a lawsuit against the F.B.I. for carrying out
illegal political surveillance of legal, activist organizations,
including the Guild.
In the 1990s, Guild members mobilized opposition to the Gulf
War, defended the rights of Haitian refugees escaping from a U.S.-
sponsored dictatorship, opposed the U.S. embargo of Cuba and began to
define a new civil rights agenda that includes the right to employment,
education, housing and health care. Legal theories for holding foreign
human rights violators accountable in U.S. courts based on early 19th
Century statutes were pioneered by Guild lawyers. The Guild began
developing an analysis of the impact of "globalization" on human rights
and the environment several years before the Seattle demonstrations,
and our members have played an active role opposing NAFTA and in
facilitating and supporting the growing movement for the globalization of
justice. As the 20th Century came to a close, the Guild was defending
anti-globalization, environmental and labor rights activists from
Seattle, to D.C., to L.A. Guild members were playing an active role in
encouraging cross-border labor organizing and in exposing the a
buses in the maquiladoras on the U.S.-Mexico Border. The NLG's Project
for Human, Economic and Environmental Defense (HEED) and the Committee
on Corporations, the Constitution & Human Rights began working on "globalization" issues.
Today and Tomorrow
At
the turn of the 21st Century, globalization of information and economic
activity is a fact of life, but so is the globalization of extremes in
wealth and poverty. Guild members have long recognized that neither
democracy nor social justice is possible, internationally or
domestically, in the face of vast disparities in individual and social
wealth. In short, we have always seen questions of economic and social
class as inextricably intertwined with most domestic an international
justice issues.
Domestically, the betrayal of democracy and the Supreme
Court's integrity in Bush v. Gore has made clear that the struggle for
real democracy in the U.S. is far from over. The intertwining of
governmental power with the influence of corporations, epitomized by
the ENRON debacle, has confirmed fighting corporate power will be a
major challenge for the American people in the new century. The seizure
of governmental power, the huge buildup of military might and the
attack on civil liberties after the 9-11 tragedy, together with the
scapegoating of Muslims, Middle-Eastern immigrants and the re-creation
of McCarthyesque "anti-terrorism" measures, has demonstrated that the
Guild must, once again, play the role for which history and experience
has prepared its members.
Guild members lobbied Congress and worked with the House
Judiciary Committee in a failing effort to turn back the worst aspects
of the 2001 USA PATRIOT Act. Guild members filed the first challenges
to the detention of prisoners from Afghanistan and to the use of
military tribunals. Across the nation, Guild members are demanding that
civil liberties be protected and that the U.S. Government respect the
Constitution and international law at home and abroad. Guild members
are defending activists, representing immigrants facing deportation,
testifying in federal and state legislatures against civil liberties
cutbacks. They are using their experience and professional skills to
help build the 21st Century grassroots movements that will be necessary
to protect civil liberties and to defend democracy now and in the
future.
From National Lawyers Guild
National Lawyers Guild is a student organization of the University of Wisconsin Law School.