National Lawyers Guild - Misplaced Pages

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The National Lawyers Guild is a progressive Bar Association in the United States for lawyers and law students, as well as paralegals, legal secretaries, jailhouse lawyers, and other legal workers. It was founded in 1937 http://www.lib.neu.edu/libraries_and_collections/archives_special/national_lawyers/] as an alternative to the American Bar Association, which was segregated (see racial segregation) at that time. The NLG is made up of national projects, committees and local chapters across the country. 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."

According to a summary prepared by the New York University Tamiment Library: "Since its founding, the Guild has been instrumental in leading struggles for civil rights and civil liberties in numerous historic legal controversies."

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.

Politics

The NLG opposes the PATRIOT Act, corporate globalization, the World Trade Organization, and has called for the adoption of "the Plan of Action from the 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance."

The NLG supported attorney Lynne Stewart when she was charged and convicted of transmitting terrorist communications from prison by Omar Abdel-Rahman, her former client and mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombings. The NLG condemned Stewart's conviction. Others joined the NLG in this condemnation. Attorney Elaine Cassel noted that "Stewart never provided any financial support, weaponry -- or any other concrete aid -- for any act of terrorism. No act of terrorism is alleged to have resulted from her actions."

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 charges of funding terrorists. He was later acquited of the charges.

History

According to Professor Peter Erlinder, the National Lawyers Guild was started in the 1930's by attorneys who supported the labor movement and Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, "in the face of determined ABA opposition."

It should be noted that one website claims the NLG was started by the Communist Party USA.

During the Cold War, the NLG was an active affiliate of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. In 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."

According to NYU's Tamiment library:

"In the 1950s, HUAC labeled the Guild as a "Communist-front" organization and issued a publication entitled "The National Lawyers Guild: Bulwark of the Communist Party." Attorney General Herbert Brownell asserted that the Guild was controlled by the Communist Party. After years of legal battles, the U. S. Supreme Court granted the Guild injunctive relief and ended its persecution at the hands of Congress and the Attorney General's office."

Membership

The membership of the NLG consists of lawyers, law students, legal workers and jailhouse lawyers. According to Chip Berlet, former Vice President of the NLG:

"In the 1950s the National Lawyers Guild refused to purge its members who were members of the Communist Party. Today there are Guild members who are cadres in a variety of communist groups along with a majority of unaffiliated members. As a paralegal investigator, I joined the Guild in the 1970s. I found an example of an organization that tried hard to incorporate the participation of cadres within a democratic structure.

Easy? You must be kidding! The cacophony at some (Guild) meetings makes Star Wars seem like a minimalist film. I have chaired committee meetings with 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."

Funding

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

Attacks from the political right

Since its founding, the NLG has been under attack by right-wing critics. Central to this process is the claim that the organization is a communist front, or more recently, a nest of terrorists--claims repeatedly denied by the organization's leadership. Examples follow.

“While the Guild is not officially communist or Marxist, its membership, leadership, past internal struggles, and adopted stances consistently point to an organization whose underlying convictions could best be described as such.” (FrontPageMagazine.com; Jesse Rigby; 25 April 2003.)

“The ‘Guild’ promoted "liberation" (i.e. Marxist) movements or groups overseas in the 1970s, including the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Viet Cong, the African National Congress, pro-Soviet Angolan and Mozambican factions, the Puerto Rican FALN, and the Philippine New People’s Army, "the military wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines."

In 1950, the House Committee on Un-American Activities issued its "Report on the National Lawyers Guild: Legal Bulwark of the Communist Party," declaring the Guild an integral part of an overall Communist strategy aimed at weakening our nation’s defenses against the international Communist conspiracy." The report recommended that Guild members be barred from federal employment…

The NLG provides a vehicle for a class of lawyers who 'explode the law instead of buildings and people.’

NLG lawyers ‘facilitate the coming anti-capitalist revolution by weakening the law’s ability to function effectively against law-breaking radicals in a "legal struggle" that coincides alongside illegal, militant revolutionary activity.'

[full quote from: Notes on the National Lawyer’s Guild: “Prominent Guild member and Rutgers University School of Law Professor Arthur Kinoy argued that the role of the radical lawyer was to facilitate the coming anti-capitalist revolution by weakening the law’s ability to function effectively against law-breaking radicals.

Future Guild President Paul Harris even quoted Lenin, saying that a successful revolution required a "legal struggle" that coincided alongside illegal, militant revolutionary activity.

Doris Brin Walker, President of the Guild in 1970-71, remarked at a dinner held in her honor in 1981 that,"It is this commitment (to “the struggle”) which makes me so proud to be a member of the Communist Party,” and argued that "bourgeois democratic rights" had value only as a means of insulating the coming "Second American Revolution "from government inhibition.” (from: NLG: The Legal Fifth Column, by By Jesse Rigsby]

Sources

Doron Weinberg and Marty Fassler, A Historical Sketch of the National Lawyers Guild in American Politics, 1936-1968. National Lawyers Guild, n.d.

Various authors, NATIONAL LAWYERS GUILD, http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6162

External links

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Law organizations