Our Annual Celebration is coming up on Friday, November 15th, 5:30 – 9:30pm at the Hatchery, 135 N Kedzie. Come celebrate 82 years of law for the people! Buy tickets now at www.tinyurl.com/2019AnnualCelebration
Join us for a night of eating, drinking, and merrymaking to support the work of NLG Chicago. Our 2019 celebration will be a chance for lawyers, legal workers, law students, and all our friends and comrades to come together. There will be catered vegan appetizers, a fabulous silent auction, and more! Space is wheelchair accessible. For other accessibility inquiries or any additional questions, please email chicago@nlg.org.
Our Kinoy Award honoree this year is Dima Khalidi. Dima Khalidi is the founder and director of Palestine Legal. She oversees Palestine Legal’s array of legal and advocacy work to protect people speaking out for Palestinian freedom from attacks on their civil and constitutional rights. Over the last seven years, in collaboration with the NLG and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), Dima has built Pal
estine Legal into a 9-person movement lawyering nonprofit that takes the lead from the movement it serves, using the law as one among many tools that can be deployed together to fight injustice. Palestine Legal’s support to activists advocating for Palestinian freedom and resisting widespread efforts to shut them down models a kind of principled advocacy that demands our individual rights of speech and association, and our collective right to join for justice. Dima’s leadership has built an institution that protects the people who are questioning one of the most entrenched of orthodoxies – unquestioning support for Israel and the political ideology of Zionism – and that is committed to building solidarity with and uplifting other movements for social justice. As a leader, Dima is dedicated to supporting others in building their collective power – both inside the organization she directs and outside in the movements she supports.
Dima’s past work has also served the Palestinian cause in various ways. She worked with CCR as a cooperating attorney on the Mamilla Cemetery Campaign, petitioning United Nations officials to stop the desecration of an ancient Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem, and advocating on behalf of Palestinian descendants of individuals interred in the cemetery. As a volunteer and intern at CCR, she worked on cases seeking accountability for Israeli violations of international law, as well as on CCR’s Guantanamo Bay docket. She also interned with the People’s Law Office in Chicago, assisting in the acquittal of Palestinian-American Muhammad Salah on major federal criminal charges.
The Arthur Kinoy Peoples Law Award is in honor of Arthur Kinoy, a celebrated and beloved member of the National Lawyers Guild who dedicated himself to using the law in service of the people and encouraged generations of others to do the same. Arthur Kinoy was a fierce civil rights lawyer, a co-founder of the Center for Constitutional Rights, and an active Guild member for most of his adult life.
