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February 22, 2018 by Admin

NLG Chicago Condemns Edmund Burke Society’s Racist Rhetoric

On January 30th, the Edmund Burke Society at the University of Chicago Law School released an event promotion for an immigration debate to be held Tuesday, February 6th, at 7:30pm at Ida Noyes Hall on UChicago’s campus.

In promoting its “debate”, the organization trivialized the issue and mocked people who are directly impacted by immigration policy. The Society called immigrants “other nations’ wretched refuse”, “Chinese entrepreneurs pursuing Fortune’s cookie,” and posited that “no engineer is worth the drag of a freeloading cousin.” Even in representing an ostensibly pro-immigrant stance, the flier’s authors ask, “[W]ithout foreign labor and grit, who will build the wall?”

The Edmund Burke Society’s event promotion denigrates and dehumanizes immigrants everywhere. Instead of opening a meaningful dialogue, it legitimizes the racist and xenophobic ideals we have seen rise to power in the past year. As institutions of education, law schools should fuel inclusion and serious conversation, not host racist and demeaning rhetoric.

The National Lawyers’ Guild – Chicago Chapter stands with immigrants unconditionally. This abhorrent rhetoric is exactly what the NLG, in Chicago and across the nation, has fought against since its inception. We condemn the Edmund Burke Society’s rhetoric in the strongest terms possible and encourage our members to stand up against hateful speech wherever they encounter it.

Filed Under: Blog, Events, Featured Articles, Law Schools, University of Chicago

December 15, 2017 by Admin

Highlights from DisO 2017

Dis-Orientation is an annual city-wide retreat for law students held by the National Lawyers Guild of Chicago. This year, Dis-Orientation was hosted by Chicago-Kent College of Law Chapter. The speakers for this year were lawyers and organizers with People’s Law Office, Chicago Community Bond Fund, Community Activism Law Alliance, First Defense Legal Aid, Uptown People’s Law Center, and other organizations.

Timothy Rose of People’s Response Team, Emily Coffey and Quinn Rallins of the Shriver Center, and Lam Ho of CALA speak what law in action looks like.

Lavette Mayes of CCBF and Monica Crosby of UPLC explained what lawyers need to do to be accountable to oppressed communities and liberation movements.

The panel on the role of policy was led by Lilian Jimenez, Chief of Staff for Commissioner Chuy Garcia, Alan Mills of UPLC, Max Suchan of CCBF and Samoane Williams of Raise the Floor.

The event was topped off with a Legal Observer training led by two experienced law student LOs from Kent Law School and John Marshall Law School.

Filed Under: Blog, Chicago-Kent, Events, Featured Articles, John Marshall, Law Schools, Legal Observers

October 31, 2017 by Admin

We Remember Debra Evenson – Celebrating 80 Years of Law for the People

Debra Evenson leafleting in Daley Plaza for women’s rights

A past president of the Guild, law professor, and one of the nation’s foremost authorities on the legal system and institutions of Cuba, Debra Evenson represented the finest tradition of a People’s lawyer.

Debra was an American legal expert on Cuba, a practicing lawyer, and an educator. She was president of the National Lawyers Guild from 1988 until 1991. During the McCarthy era, Guild membership dwindled to a few hundred. She was part of the generation of young lawyers and law students that revived it in the late 60s and early 70s, combining political passion to combat injustice and exploitation with outstanding legal skills.

Debra also was a founding board member of the Sugar Law Center and remained on the Board until her death. Her work as a board member was instrumental in helping the Sugar Law Center defend the rights of working people in plant closing cases and the Center’s other important work.

She left DePaul University in 1992, and joined the New York City law firm Rabinowitz, Boudin, Standard, Krinsky & Lieberman. With the firm, Evenson represented the Cuban government, supporting Cuban sovereignty. She was also licensed to practice law in Cuba, where she worked with high government officials and civilians. From 1996-2001, Evenson was president of the Latin American Institute for Alternative Legal Services (ILSA) headquartered in Bogota, Columbia. During her tenure as president, ILSA organized important conferences related to legal services and human rights in Latin America, Asia and Africa and expanded its collaboration with human rights lawyers in Latin America, Central America and the Caribbean.

Debra died in Chicago on August 17, 2011, continuing to teach us through her grace and resilience confronting cancer. She was awarded the Kinoy Award for that year. She will be deeply missed.

With your help, we can build the next generation of people’s lawyers. For our 80th Anniversary, show your support for the Guild by buying a ticket!

Filed Under: Blog, DePaul, Events, Featured Articles, Law Schools, Media

October 26, 2017 by Admin

NLG Chi Proud to Present Kinoy Award to Bernardine Dohrn

This year the National Lawyers Guild is honoring Bernardine Dohrn for the Kinoy Award at our Annual Celebration. We are grateful for her steadfast and decades long commitment to the struggle for justice and global equality and her tireless mentorship of the next generation of people’s lawyers.

 
 
 

Here Bernardine Dohrn tells us of her work with the Guild, and shares a chapter from her book, Race Course: Against White Supremacy.
I moved to New York City to work as the first NLG law student organizer right out of law school, in June 1967.  We argued that law students and lawyers could and should be part of the Movement, as well as legal defenders of the movements: struggles against the imperialist war against Vietnam, against the draft and military injustice, in support of the Black Liberation movement including political prisoners, SNCC and the Black Panther Party.  We mobilized legal support for mass arrests at the Pentagon, demonstrations against Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara, GI’s returning their medals, the demands of Black Student Unions for African American history, culture, faculty and open enrollment, for an end to secret university war-releated research and their occupation of neighboring Black communities. We urged support for living wages for university staff and employees, and the rights of Black workers in DRUM. As I travelled to law schools across the country, law students eagerly establish NLG chapters to focus their work, and the NLG took root among radical lawyers and flourished.

 

After a decade as a federal fugitive on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list I was subpoenaed and called before a federal grand jury investigating the Brinks robbery in Manhattan in 1982.  Two of the persons charged in the Brinks robbery were Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert.  Due to their imprisonment, their 14 month-old son, Chesa Boudin joined our family as our third son, and always visited and maintained his close relationships with his biological parents, Kathy and David.   The narrative below tells that story.

 

Excerpt from Race Course: Against White Supremacy,
by Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, Third World Press, 2009
Chapter: The Modern Slave Ship, by Bernardine Dohrn

 
 

“I did time in the federal correction center while the {3} children were young, and they visited me separately each week.  With Zayd, who was five, I did elaborate homemade crossword puzzles, we read books, and then talked about why the other women in the visiting room were incarcerated, and who was visiting them.  He jumped into my arms to tell me about the long wait downstairs, the searches, and the ways in which guards shouted to waiting families about dress codes and contraband.  He sat on my lap for the whole visit, and when he left with the comforting friend who always brought him, he would wave to me from across the street until I flashed the lights in my cell as a final goodbye.

 

Visits from two-year-old Malik were excruciating but deeply satisfying.  He almost always went directly to sleep in my arms, so I could breathe in his toddler smell and nuzzle his cheeks and neck, examine his hands with impunity.  Although he was verbal and articulate, able to say that his suddenly new brother Chesa “can’t have my mommy,” he chose silence during our visits.  Chesa, already visiting his biological parents in prison as a one year old, visited me less often.

 

The Metropolitan Correctional Center is at the edge of Chinatown and across from the New York City Police Headquarters in Lower Manhattan.  From certain cells, we could see the Brooklyn Bridge.  Only one floor of the tall, narrow pre-trial building housed women: we were some eighty women in a prison of more than a thousand men.  That made every venture away from our unit an unpredictable voyage: entry into a packed elevator of male prisoners and guards; processing in the lawyers’ visiting area with shouting male voices vying to hear each other; unexpected conversations in line waiting to see a medic.  Because none of us were yet convicted, we did not endure the routine strip searches and internal examination of bodily cavities that characterize women’s prisons, nor were we routinely subjected to sexualized violence.

 

The women on our unit were African American if they lived in New York City, or Latinas direct from Colombia or Mexico who spoke only Spanish.  The women from Latin America had seen only Kennedy Airport and the MCC in North America; they cried and said rosaries and were humorously willing to try to teach this ignorant gringa Spanish.  All were charged with  carrying drugs into the U.S. as “mules”; none were major or even regular drug dealers but each had taken one crazy, terrible risk, in the hopes of getting money to help their children have better lives.  The women were being prosecuted primarily to “flip” them, to give evidence against male higher-ups.  There was no word then for globalization but these women were an advanced wave of the so-called war on drugs and the escalating incarceration and criminalization of women.  At the current rates of incarcerating women, there will be more women in prison in 2010 than there were all prisoners in the U.S. in 1970.  Such is the taken-for-granted of what passes for crime control.

 

My closest friend was Cheryl, ten years older and able to beat me regularly at Scrabble.  Cheryl spent a good part of the day on the pay phone; she was openly proud that her craft (hotel boosting, or robbing hotel rooms) required wit and never violence.  Cheryl taught me to count to ten slowly whenever it appeared that a fight was jumping off between women prisoners, and she schooled me in the fact that women were likely to shout, to get in each other’s faces, but that if a punch had not been thrown by the number ten, it would stay verbal.  In fact, the women on the unit were generous and kind to one another, organizing efficiently to nurse a new prisoner who was detoxifying and miserably sick by sitting with her in shifts, sponging her face, offering clean sheets.  They knew how to get through holidays together.  We shared books and cosmetics.  We plotted how to get out along with the (all male) guards if there were a fire in the building.  Some were geniuses at sewing and making the miserable navy blue uniforms look tight.

 

My term in prison was indeterminate and bizarre.  I was jailed for refusing to obey the order of a judge to cooperate with a federal grand jury by giving samples of my handwriting.  I was held in civil contempt of court, although my lawyer and I argue that the government was in possession of rooms filled with my handwriting, since they had seized files and letters from my apartments during COINTELPRO, a secret and illegal FBI program), and I had subsequently been a federal fugitive for eleven years.  It was anguishing to be separated from our young children, but I saw resistance as a question of principle.  During our years outside the law, scores of people refused to cooperate with grand jury witch hunt, organized to try to find members of the Weather Underground.  The government grand jury strategy failed because ordinary people, innocent people, refused to cooperate.  I could not do differently, even in different circumstances.

 

The dilemma was that there is no sentence when you are held in contempt.  The idea of the prosecutor is to coerce your testimony, a relic from the British Star Chamber proceedings.  So we (there were fifteen women who defied the grand jury, all of us at MCC) were ordered to be held until we cooperated, or until the U.S. attorney decided to indict us, or until their interest moved on to other matters.  I had been back in ordinary life, above ground, for just a year, working as a waiter, then at a law firm, being a mom of three boys, and thinking about how to reinvent myself as an activist at the age of forty.  Bill visited me every single day, parented three small children, and tried to cope.

 

As it turned out, I served just seven months.  I was released on a motion that argued that since I would never cooperate, because I was willful and stubborn, the contempt sentence had become “punishment” instead of “coercion”.  The other grand jury women were similarly released, or were charged in huge RICO conspiracy indictments.  I thought I would never forget my prison number, never want to read another murder mystery, or do yoga again.  But back with my family, we began the prison visits with Kathy and David that would characterize the next twenty years.”
 

The National Lawyers Guild is proud to be presenting the Kinoy Award to Bernardine Dohrn. For our 80th Anniversary, show your support for the Guild by buying a ticket!

 

Filed Under: Blog, Events, Featured Articles, Law Schools, Media

October 19, 2017 by Admin

We Remember Arthur Kinoy – Celebrating 80 Years of Law for the People

Arthur Kinoy (center)

Arthur Kinoy (September 20, 1920 – September 19, 2003), was an American attorney and progressive civil rights leader. He served as a professor of law at the Rutgers School of Law–Newark from 1964 to 1991.

Kinoy took an active part in the defense of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg from 1951, who were convicted of atomic espionage. During the 1950s and 1960s, Kinoy represented persons called to hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities; in 1966 he was officially removed from a hearing by Senator Eastland, its chair, and subsequently convicted of disorderly conduct. In 1968, the U.S. Court of Appeals overturned the conviction. In 1964, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement activities in the South to end disenfranchisement and segregation, he participated in a conference sponsored by the National Lawyers Guild’s Committee for Legal Assistance in the South. It briefed attorneys on legal problems confronting civil rights demonstrators in Mississippi, where state and local governments resisted change. He and his partner, William Kunstler, were two of the most prominent attorneys during the 1960s to handle civil rights cases in the South.

Mr. Kinoy was involved in a number of landmark legal verdicts. In 1965, he successfully argued the case of Dombrowski v. Pfister before the Supreme Court, which empowered federal district court judges to stop enforcement of laws that had ‘a chilling effect’ on free speech. In a subsequent case, Dombrowski v. Senator Eastland, he established that the Counsel of the Senate Internal Security Committee was not immune from suits for violations of citizens’ civil rights. In 1972, the Supreme Court upheld his contention that President Richard M. Nixon had no ‘inherent power’ to wiretap domestic political organizations.

You can also watch an excellent interview of Kinoy, hosted by the Film Archive.

We honor and remember Arthur Kinoy for his visionary leadership. His stalwart defense of free speech, and his commitment to the rights of oppressed people, is an inspiration to all of us in the Guild. We thank him for passing on the torch to a whole new generation of people’s lawyers during his years as a professor.

With your help, we can build the next generation of people’s lawyers. For our 80th Anniversary, show your support for the Guild by buying a ticket and becoming a sponsor!

Filed Under: Blog, Events, Featured Articles, Law Schools, Media

May 18, 2017 by Admin

JMLS Hosts The Path of Resistance: A Public Interest Symposium

The JMLS student chapters of the National Lawyers Guild and The American Constitution Society hosted a symposium on public interest law on Thursday, April 13th, as their final event of the semester.

Six attorneys from diverse public interest fields discussed their practices and offered advice on navigating law school and developing a career in people’s law.

Aneesha Gandhi is a Supervising Attorney at the National Immigrant Justice Center’s LGBT Immigration Rights Initiative. She primarily handles LGBT asylum cases.

Dima Khalidi is the founder and director of Palestine Legal. Her work focuses on advocating for and providing legal advice to Palestinian advocates.

Iveliz Orellano is an Assistant Cook County Public Defender and JMLS graduate. She began her career litigating civil rights and police misconduct cases.

Nicole Schult is an attorney at Uptown People’s Law Center. Her practice areas include: fair housing, social security, and prisoner’s rights.

Quinn Rallins is a community and health care justice attorney at the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law. He began his career as a clerk at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Equal Justice Initiative, and Greater Boston Legal Services.

Steven Saltzman has practiced law for over forty years. His practice areas include criminal defense, police brutality, and employment law.

 

Filed Under: Blog, Events, Featured Articles, John Marshall, Law Schools

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