National Lawyers Guild thumbs up on Venezuela April 14 election

[Judi Lynn]

14. About the National Lawyers Guild

About the National Lawyers Guild
Tuesday, 21 September 2010 22:09 administrator

We seek to unite the lawyers, law students, legal workers, and jailhouse lawyers of America in an organization which shall function as an effective political and social force in the service of the people, to the end that human rights shall be regarded as more sacred than property interests.

-- Preamble to the NLG Constitution, 1937 as amended 1971

Founded in 1937, the National Lawyers Guild was the nation's first racially integrated bar association. The first "Guild lawyers" supported the New Deal, assisted the emerging industrial labor movement, and opposed racial segregation in the American Bar Association and the larger society. The Guild was the first national bar association to oppose the Death Penalty. During its more than 60 year history, the NLG has been an important part of the struggle of the American people 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, its first female president in the 1960s and its first legal worker president in 1996.

Our History

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's 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. NLG members helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and founded one of the first UN-accredited human rights NGOs in 1948, the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL).

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 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 consequently, the NLG was unjustly labeled "subversive" by the Justice Department, which later admitted the charges were baseless, after 10 years of federal litigation. This period in the Guild's history made the defense of democratic rights and the dangers of "political profiling" more than theoretical questions for Guild members and provided valuable experience in defending First Amendment freedoms that informs the work of the NLG today.

In the 1960s, the Guild set up offices in the South and organized thousands of volunteer lawyers and law students to support the Civil Rights Movement, long before the federal government or other bar associations were involved. Guild members represented the families of murdered civil rights activists Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman, who had heeded the NLG's call to join the civil rights struggle and were assassinated by local law enforcement-Ku Klux Klan members, which was fictionalized in the film Missippi Burning. NLG-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.

More:
http://www.michigannlg.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=55&Itemid=58