SIDEBAR Fall 2018 - 26

MONTGOMERYBAR.ORG

SIDEBAR FEATURE

National Lawyers Guild
By Jules J. Mermelstein, Esq.

B

efore I begin describing this
organization I need to give full
disclosure. I am a Regional
Vice President, representing the MidAtlantic Region (eastern half of PA,
all of MD, DC, and the northern
half of VA) to its National Executive
Committee.
The National Lawyers Guild is perhaps the most impressive
legal organization of which you've never heard. I was not aware
of it until I took a break from practicing law to enter education.
They are generally on the progressive side of most issues. In fact,
the Philadelphia Chapter fields a softball team named "The Lefty
Fielders." Here is a brief history.
We were founded in 1937 as the first racially integrated bar
association. In the early years, members organized labor unions,
prosecuted Nazis at Nuremberg, and helped draft the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights. During the McCarthy time,
members represented the victims of anti-communist hysteria.
In the 1960s, the Guild organized both volunteer attorneys and
law students to support the civil rights movement. During the
1970s, members represented Vietnam War draft resisters, antiwar
activists, and soldiers who opposed the war. The Guild defended
members of the Black Panther Party, the American Indian
Movement, and the Puerto Rican independence movement
while also helping to expose illegal FBI and CIA surveillance.
Recently the Guild has worked for global justice, supporting
environmental and animal rights, and information activists
as well as whistleblowers and people arrested for helping the
Occupy and Black Lives Matter movements.

26 SIDEBAR

The emphasis of the Guild is on
human rights being more important
than property rights. We accept no
corporate or government funding and
therefore the Guild is member-driven in
its work. Members of the Guild include
not only attorneys, but also legal
workers, law students, and jailhouse
lawyers. There is also a Friends group for those not associated
with the legal profession.
The Guild has leaders in all areas of the law, academia,
other legal organizations, and the judiciary (Thurgood Marshall
was a member until the day he died). Regional and national
conferences address legal and political issues and often include
CLE credit.
The Guild publishes Know Your Rights handbooks in five
languages as well as a quarterly law journal and original reports
on legal topics such as policing and surveillance.
As a member of NLG, I have embraced certain opportunities.
For instance, as I write this, I have reviewed hundreds of
Kavanaugh documents, looking for civil liberties issues on behalf
of the American Constitution Society, which turned to the NLG
seeking volunteer attorneys to review his documents divided by
various issues.
To learn more about the NLG, visit the website at https://
www.nlg.org and explore the site. Here is a paragraph taken
right from the site:


https://montgomerybar.org/ https://www.nlg.org https://www.nlg.org

SIDEBAR Fall 2018

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