Who Should Join?

The Guild is both a professional association and an activist organization. Our founding goal, in 1937, was to be a home for American lawyers of all races. In the 70s, at the insistence of a new generation of feminist lawyers, the NLG became the first bar association to admit law students and non-attorneys working in the law.

As then amended, the NLG Constitution defines legal worker as.any person who is currently working, or who has worked, or who is training to work in any office, collective or other institution, which has as its primary function the provision or administration of legal services, information or education; or who, as an individual, provides or administers legal services, information, or education as a major component of her or his work.

Guild legal workers include:

• Paralegals in firms large & small
• Investigators in indigent defense organizations such as Federal defender offices and private non-profits
• Licensed private investigators
• Sentencing mitigation specialists
• Social workers

Law Students: $15
Jailhouse Lawyers: no dues, but $7.50 required for Guild Notes subscription
New Lawyers and Legal Workers: $50

After first year, annual membership dues are as follows:

Under $20,000 — $45-75
$20,000 to $25,000 — $75-100
$25,000 to $30,000 — $110-165
$30,000 to $40,000 — $165-220
$40,000 to $50,000 — $220-275
$50,000 to $65,000 — $275-325
$65,000 to $75,000 — $325-375
$75,000 to $100,000 — $375-425
Over $100,000 — $500 or more*

*Sustaining member-includes waiver of $100 annual convention registration fees Members of Affiliated Minority Legal Organizations one-half of the standard dues Half of your dues are sent to your local NLG chapter and region. Dues may be tax deductible as a professional expense to the extent allowed by law.

Repeat after us:

Law School is not the Most Alienating Experience of My Life 
I am Always Treated with the Respect I Deserve
Taking a Public-Interest Salary will still Seem Like a Good Idea After Graduation, Because What's a Little Debt Between Friends?
This is Fun. This is Fun. This is Fun

Don't worry. You really can survive this with your moral sensibility intact. Your fellow students in the NLG are there for you.

If you are still in need of inspiration, try this.  Assume:

1. The fundamental forms of social misery in American society can be neither adequately addressed nor substantially transformed within the context of existing legal apparatuses. Yet serious and committed work within this circumscribed context remains indispensable if progressive politics is to have any future at all. This refers to the defensive role of progressive lawyers.
    
2. This crucial work will remain primarily defensive until significant extraparliamentary social motion or movements bring power and pressure to bear on the status quo. This means either rebellious acts of desperation that threaten the social order or grassroots citizen participation in credible progressive projects.
    
3. Progressive legal practitioners must link their work within the system to movements that attempt to transform American society fundamentally.

Paraphrased from "The Role of the Law in Progressive Politics," Cornel West, in The Cornel West Reader. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999.

Please make checks payable to:
National Lawyers Guild

And send them to:
National Lawyers Guild, National Office
132 Nassau Street, RM 922
New York NY 10038

Help us throw a fundraiser: contact@nlgchicago.org

For the public good or welfare

The American Bar Association's Code of Professional Responsibility states in part that "the basic responsibility for providing legal services to those unable to pay ultimately rests upon the individual lawyer."

While finding this take on things a tad myopic, NLG Chicago member-attorneys are serious about their duty to work as people's lawyers.

We are aware of and "dedicated to the need for basic and progressive change in the structure of our political and economic system," but, in the meantime, our lawyers and legal workers will pull their weight in the struggle to bring competent, zealous, and free or affordable legal services to the public.

There are National Lawyers Guild chapters at each of the law schools in Chicago:

Chicago-Kent
DePaul
John Marshall
Loyola
Northwestern
University of Chicago