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National Lawyers Guild

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The National Lawyers Guild is a radical far-Left Bar Association in the United States for lawyers and related professions. Similar in some respects to the American Civil Liberties Union, it has stronger leftist political leanings. It was founded in 1936 by the Communist Party USA. During the Cold War, the NLG was an active affiliate of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, a front for the Soviet Union. During 1978, the CIA described the NLG as "one of the most useful Communist front organizations at the service of the Soviet Communist Party, has so consistently demonstrated its support of Moscow's foreign policy objectives, and is so tied in with other front organizations and the Communist press, that it is difficult for it to pretend that its judgments are fair or relevant to basic legal tenets."

The NLG has been the vanguard of the Open Borders Lobby. The NLG opposes the Patriot Act, globalization, big business, the WTO, called for the adoption of "the Plan of Action from the 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance" (which were composed of high anti-American and anti-Israeli sentiments), and has given open support to convicted terrorist lawyer Lynne Stewart, post-conviction. Former NLG executive vice president Kit Gage replaced Sami al-Arian as president of the National Coalition to Protect Political Freedom (NCPPF) after al-Arian's February 2003 arrest on a number of terrorism charges.

The NLG is directly associated with the following far-Left organizations: Communist Party USA (CPUSA), Open Borders Lobby, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, Communities in Solidarity with Immigrant Workers, Refuse & Resist, Global Exchange (whose leader has been widely credited as being behind the Seattle WTO riots). The NLG is a member organization of the far-Left United for Peace and Justice coalition. Far left activist Chip Berlet is involved in the leadership of the National Lawyers Guild and has served as its Vice President, despite not having a law degree and not being an attorney himself.

According to Berlet:

"The cacophony at some meetings. . . debates featuring cadres from Leninist, Trotskyist, Stalinist, and Maoist groups, along with Marxists, anarchists, libertarians, and progressive independents - interacting with a preponderance of reluctant Democrats - all intertwined with multiple alternate identities as lawyers, legal workers, labor organizers, tribal sovereignty activists, civil liberties and civil rights advocates, environmentalists, feminists, gay men and lesbians, and people of color."

The NLG has received funding from the Open Society Institute, the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Ford Foundation.

The NLG constitution states that one of its purposes is to establish a social and political movement "to the end that human rights shall be more sacred than property interests."

Michael Avery, a law professor at Suffolk University Law School, is the current President of the National Lawyers Guild. President-Elect Marjorie Cohn, a law professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, will become President in October 2006.

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