National Lawyers Guild

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The National Lawyers Guild is based in New York, NY and was organized with the assistance of the Communist International in 1936 as a legal action front operated by the Communist Party USA.^[1]; ^[2]; ^[3]. It is the largest U.S. affiliate of the Soviet-controlled International Association of Democratic Lawyers.^[4]

Contents 1 Soviet front affiliate 2 Mission 3 History 4 Communist affiliations 5 Activism 5.1 Trial lawyers 5.2 Southern activism 5.3 Taking on the government 5.4 NLG Members Listed in Congressional Hearings/Reports 6 International issues 6.1 Opposition to Nuclear Weapons 6.2 Immigration 7 Modern times 8 National Executive Committee 9 Supporter of the New American Movement 10 References

Soviet front affiliate

The National Lawyers Guild has long been and remains a member of the old Soviet front organization, the International Association of Democratic Lawyers^[5].

While there are small numbers of Maoists, Trotskyites and independent Marxist "New Leftists" in the organization, the NLG's international positions and real domestic control lies with the supporters of the Soviet and Cuban Communist regimes. During the 1970s, the NLG's cooperation with the Cuban government has escalated markedly.^[4]

Mission

The National Lawyers Guild is openly socialist:^[6]

The National Lawyers Guild is an association dedicated to the need for basic change in the structure of our political and economic system. We seek to unite the lawyers, law students, legal workers and jailhouse lawyers of America in an organization that 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.

Our aim is to bring together all those who recognize the importance of safeguarding and extending the rights of workers, women, farmers, people with disabilities and people of color, upon whom the welfare of the entire nation depends; who seek actively to eliminate racism; who work to maintain and protect our civil rights and liberties in the face of persistent attacks upon them; and who look upon the law as an instrument for the protection of the people, rather than for their repression.

History

Founded in 1936, 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.

Communist affiliations

Originally the National Lawyers Guild was as a spin-off of the International Labor Defense, a Communist front started in 1925 as the U.S. branch of the International Red Aid, a worldwide Soviet-backed group founded in 1922.^[7]

In 1940, the NLG President, Russell N. Chase, was also the attorney for the Communist Party USA in Ohio

The NLG became affiliated in 1946 with the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, another Soviet front. Guild members have been prominent in communist and far-left causes and organizations in the U.S. and have represented such clients as the Weather Underground, Students for a Democratic Society, the Cuban Government, atom spy Morton Sobell, Soviet agent Judith Coplon etc.

At the Guild's convention in Austin. Texas, in 1973 concluded with the singing of communist anthem, "The Internationale."<ref.Communists inside the Democratic Party, page 32</ref>

As at March, 1982, the Guild was the principal legal bulwark of the CPUSA, its fronts and controlled unions.^[4]

Activism

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.

As at 1982, major NLG activities include defense of revolutionaries and militant extremists charged with violent crimes, litigation against law enforcement intelligence units, and providing legal advice in advance of demonstrations with civil disobedience-in effect acting as co-conspirators in violating the law.^[4]

Trial lawyers

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 labeled “subversive” by the government.

Southern activism

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.

Taking on the government

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 Mandela 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, theNational 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.

NLG Members Listed in Congressional Hearings/Reports

'"Communist Legal Subversion: The Role of the Communist Lawyer" - Report, House Report No. 41, HCUA, Feb. 16, 1959

All these attorneys were identified as Communist Party USA members and some as Soviet operatives and spies in sworn congressional testimonies which are listed for each individual in this report.

• John J. Abt - NY, (later the second husband of Communist Party USA member and Soviet operative, Jessica Smith
• George B. Andersen- CAL
• Selma Mickel Bachelis - CAL
• Harriet Bouslog - Hawaii
• Maurice Louis Braverman - Baltimore, MD
• John Caughlan - Washington State
• Frank J. Bonner - NY
• Benjamin Dreyfus - CAL
• Bertam Edises - CAL
• Pauline Epstein - CAL
• J. Allan Frankel - CAL
• David M. Freedman - NY
• Charles R. Garry - CAL (He is the Black Panther Party attorney that Hillary Clinton worked for on the New Haven torture-murder trial of Alex Rackley. He was also one of the marxist attorneys for marxist Rev.Jim Jones,his Peoples Temple and mass murder in Guyana known as Jonestown. The other attorney for them was Mark Lane, one of the weirdest, leftist attorney in the business, and best known for his two far-out and near-fraudulent books "Rush to Judgment" and, especially "Conversations With Americans" which was torn apart as largely made up of lies by leftist Vietnam correspondent Neil Sheehan.)
• Richard Gladstein - CAL
• Aubrey W. Grossman - CAL
• Abraham Isserman - NJ
• Leon Josephson - NJ ("identified as having been a Communist and agent of Soviet Russia as far back as the late 1920's")
• Harry M. Justiz - NY
• Charles J. Katz - CAL
• Seymour Mandel - CAL
• Ben Margolis - CAL
• John T. McTernan - CAL
• John W. Porter - CAL
• David Rein - Wash. D.C. (His wife Selma Rein has also been identified as a member of the CPUSA
• Allan R. Rosenberg - Mass
• Rose S. Rosenberg - CAL
• Samuel Rosenwein - CAL
• Richard L. Rykoff - CAL
• Harry Sacher - NY
• Hyman Schlesinger - Penn
• Esther Shandler - CAL
• Robert J. Silberstein - NY
• Laurence R. Sperber - CAL
• Fred H. Steinmetz - CAL
• Jack Tenner - CAL
• Robert E. Treuhaft - CAL (Hillary Clinton worked under him along with Charles R. Garry on the New Haven Black Panther trial). His wife Decca Treuhaft was a well known author under the name of Jessica Mitford)
• Abraham Unger - NY
• Doris Brin Walker - CAL., aka Mrs. Mason Roberson and aka Doris Marasse
• Nathan Witt - NY, He was part of the CPUSA and Soviet spy ring Witt-Pressman with ties to identified Soviet spy Alger Hiss

International issues

Opposition to Nuclear Weapons

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 has produced a handbook for NLG lawyers involved in mass defense of anti-nuclear demonstrators; and NLG chapters nationwide have been active in providing aid to antinuclear power and disarmament demonstrators. The NLG is a member of the June 12 Disarmament Coalition.^[4]

Immigration

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” Nicaragua and El Salvador. The Guild organized “People’s Tribunals” 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.

Modern times

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 “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^[8].

National Executive Committee

Executive Officers^[9]

Please Note: The EXECUTIVE COUNCIL of the NLG is made up of the Executive Officers of the NLG and the Executive Director of the NLG National Office. All members of the Executive Council are also members of the National Executive Committee.

Supporter of the New American Movement

In 1981, Karen Dubinsky, Chairperson, Ontario Federation of Students; the Pittsburgh Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild; the Socialist Community School Bookstore of Los Angeles; Bonnie Lambert and Marshall Mayer; Mary Clarke and Ben Clarke were listed as supporters of the New American Movement.^[10]

References