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About
Mission
History
Today and Tomorrow
Who We Are / What We Do
More about the Milwaukee chapter
History of the National Lawyers Guild
To download the History in .pdf format, click here.
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.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Guild members represented Vietnam War draft resisters,
antiwar activists and the Chicago 7, after the 1968 Chicago Democratic 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 Mandela a "terrorist", and began the ongoing 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. Legal theories for holding
foreign human rights violators accountable in U.S. courts, based on early 19th Century
federal statutes, were pioneered by Guild lawyers. The Guild organized "People's
Tribunals" to expose the illegality of U.S. intervention in Central America that became
even more widely known as the "Iran-Contra" scandal. The Guild prevailed in a lawsuit
against the F.B.I. for illegal political surveillance of legal, activist organizations,
including the Guild. The NLG Center for Social and Economic Justice was established in
Detroit and the Guild published the first major work on sexual orientation and the law,
and the first legal practice manual on the HIV/AIDS crisis.
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. As a founding UN-NGO, the Guild
participated in the 50th anniversary of the UN and Guild members authored the first
reports that detailed U.S. violations of international human rights standards regarding
the death penalty, racism, police brutality, AIDS discrimination and economic rights.
The Guild initiated the National Coalition to Protect Political Freedom (NCPPF) to focus
opposition to "secret evidence" deportations and attacks on the First Amendment rights
after passage of the 1996 Anti-Terrorism Act and established the NLG-National Police
Accountability Project to address the widespread police violence. Guild lawyers won the
first case in the World Court that declared the use of nuclear weapons a violation of
international law.
The Guild began analyzing of the impact of "globalization" on human rights and the
environment long before the Seattle demonstrations, and played an active role opposing
NAFTA and in facilitating and supporting the growing movement for "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 actives role in encouraging cross-border labor organizing and in exposing
the abuses in the maquiladoras on the U.S.-Mexico Border. The Project for Human, Economic
and Environmental Defense (HEED) and the Committee on Corporations, the Constitution &
Human Rights focus specifically on "globalization" issues.
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414.273.1040 ::: aheitzer@igc.org ::: 606 W. Wisconsin Ave. Milwaukee, WI 53203 Suite 1706
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