Our Mission

We seek to unite the lawyers, law students, legal workers, and jailhouse lawyers of America in an organization which 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. -- Preamble to the NLG Constitution, 1937 as amended 1971

Founded in 1937, National Lawyers Guild was our nation's first racially integrated bar association. The first "Guild lawyers" supported President Roosevelt's New Deal, assisted the emerging industrial labor movement form the UAW and CIO, and opposed the racial segregation policies of the American Bar Association, which lasted until the 1960's. During its more than 70-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 all forms oppression and discrimination based on race, ethnicity, immigration status, class, gender or sexual orientation. Consistent with its commitment to 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 1950's and its first female President in the 1960's. The first non-lawyer legal worker President was elected in 1996.

Our History

In the 1940s, NLG lawyers fought against fascists in the Spanish Civil War and WW II; helped prosecute Nazis at Nuremburg. Guild lawyers; and 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 NLG was one of the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) selected by the U.S. Government to represent the American people at the founding of the U.N. in 1945. NLG members helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and founded one of the first UN-accredited human rights NGOs in 1948, the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL), whose members were unable to meet in the U.S. until the 1990's because the organization included lawyers from communist countries.

In the late 1940's and 50's, 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 Rosenberg's, 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 unjustly labeled "subversive" by Eisenhower's Attorney General. 10 years later, the Justice Department admitted in open court that the charges were baseless. This period in the Guild's history made the defense of democratic rights and the dangers of "political profiling" more than a theoretical question for its members and provided valuable experience in the necessity of defending First Amendment freedoms that guides the work of the NLG today.

In the 1960s, the Guild set up offices in the Deep 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 had heeded the NLG's call to join the civil rights struggle and were assassinated by Mississippi law enforcement members of the Ku Klux Klan. NLG-initiated lawsuits brought the Kennedy Justice Department directly into the Civil Rights struggle which was the real story behind the film "Mississippi Burning." NLG lawyers challenged the seating of the all-white Mississippi delegation at the 1964 Democratic Convention, and defended thousands of civil rights activists, arrested for exercising basic rights by establishing 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 requiring Due Process protections; and, Monell v. Dept. of Public Services, which first held municipal employers liable for brutal police-employees.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Guild members represented Vietnam War draft resisters, antiwar activists, the Chicago 7 and thousands of protesters brutalized during the police riot at the 1968 Chicago Democratic 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," which also 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 strengthening of the Freedom of Information Act and other limitations on federal investigative power, now under attack following 9-11. The NLG supported self-determination for Palestine and condemned Israeli apartheid in the 1970's and opposed apartheid in South Africa, at a time when the U.S. Government still called Nelson Mandella a "terrorist." The NLG began the fight against the blockade of Cuba and for the freedom of Americans to travel to Cuba and other "forbidden" countries. During this period, NLG members founded other important civil rights and human rights institutions, such as: the Center Constitutional Rights; the National 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 L.A.

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 of 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 National Immigration Project began working systematically on immigration issues, spurred by the need to represent Central American refugees fleeing U.S. sponsored "terror" Nicaragua and El Salvador, and asylum activists who supported refugees. The Guild organized "People's Tribunals" to expose the illegality of U.S. intervention in Central America that became 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. The NLG-Sugar Center for Social and Economic Justice in Detroit was founded to link labor and social issues. The NLG published both the first major work on sexual orientation and the law, and the first practice manual to address the AIDS epidemic.

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. As a UN-founding NGO, the Guild participated in the 50th anniversary of the UN and Guild members authored the first reports that detailed U.S. violations of international human rights standards regarding the death penalty, racism, police brutality, AIDS discrimination and economic rights. Legal theories for holding foreign human rights violators accountable in U.S. courts based on early 19th Century statutes were pioneered by Guild lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights. The NLG initiated the National Coalition to Protect Political Freedom (NCPPF) to focus opposition to "secret evidence" deportations and attacks on the First Amendment rights after passage of Clinton's 1996 Anti-Terrorism Act and established the NLG-National Police Accountability Project to address the widespread police violence.

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 abuses 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.

Today and Tomorrow

At the turn of the 21st Century, globalization of information and economic activity is a fact of life, but so is the globalization of extremes in wealth and poverty. The American people are facing inescapable trends that will require vast restructuring of our entire society, if we are to avoid the social chaos that is already overtaking life in our major cities, or the militarized imposition of social peace that we see in other unstable societies and that is embodied in post-911 laws and policies. NLG members have long recognized that neither democracy nor social justice is possible, internationally or domestically, in the face of vast disparities in individual and social wealth. In short, we have always seen questions of economic and social class as inextricably intertwined with most domestic and international justice issues.

Domestically, the betrayal of democracy and the Supreme Court's integrity in Bush v. Gore has made clear that the struggle for real democracy in the U.S. is far from over. The intertwining of governmental power with the influence of corporations, epitomized by the ENRON debacle, has confirmed that the theme of the 1998 Convention of the NLG, "Fighting Corporate Power", will be a major challenge for the American people in the new century. The post 9-11 seizure of Executive Branch power, the huge buildup of military might to support the American Empire and the attack on civil liberties after the 9-11 tragedy, together with the scape-goating of Muslims, Middle-Eastern immigrants and the re-creation of McCarthy-esque "anti-terrorism" measures, has demonstrated that the Guild must, once again, play the role for which history and experience has prepared its members.

Guild members lobbied Congress and worked with the House Judiciary Committee in a failing effort to turn back the worst aspects of the 2001 "PATRIOT" ACT. Guild members filed the first challenges to the detention of prisoners from Afghanistan and to the use of military tribunals. Across the nation, Guild members are demanding that civil liberties be protected and that the U.S. Government respect the Constitution and international law at home and abroad. Guild members are defending activists, representing immigrants facing deportation, testifying in federal and state legislatures against civil liberties cutbacks. They are using their experience and professional skills to help build the 21st Century grass-roots movements that will be necessary to protect civil liberties and to defend democracy now and in the future.

Who We Are Today

NLG is a local as well as national organization. Local Guild chapters are active on a wide range of issues, from police misconduct to environmental concerns to homelessness. Our chapter structure allows members to become active in the struggles of their own communities, to support each other on a grassroots level and our committee structure make it possible to play a role in national political, social justice and legal issues.

This phrase from the Preamble to the Guild's Constitution that began this short description of a complex history makes clear that: The purpose of the National Lawyers Guild is... to serve the people, rather than public or private entities that fail to put human needs first. By stating clearly that...human rights shall be held more sacred than property interests, the Preamble recognizes that the economic and social needs should also be considered "rights" and that these rights often conflict with the interests of propertied elites in all nations. Adherence to these ideas resulted in charges of "subversion" during the anti-Communist hysteria of the 1950s and 1960s. Today, many of these same ideas are embodied in the United Nations International Declaration of Human Rights, many international agreements to which the U.S. is a party (or should be), and are being incorporated into 21st Century constitutional theory and practice.

These are the same principles have informed the Guild's approach to domestic legal, political and social justice issues for over 60 years. These ideas have made possible the Guild's existence as a multi-issue organization. Rather than focusing on narrow areas of professional practice, the NLG see that a wide range of social, political and legal issues, such as racism, sexism, homophobia, environmental destruction, immigrant-bashing, labor issues, voting rights, etc. are intertwined with questions of economic justice and cannot be solved through focus on specific "legal practice" issues, or through the legal system alone. As a result, in addition to belonging to other professional organizations with a specific practice or professional focus, NLG lawyers, non-lawyers, students, academics, legislators, jurists and activists from a wide range law-related work find ways to make common cause, through the National Lawyers Guild.

Join Us

The goal of building a society in which "human rights shall be regarded as more sacred than property interests" has inspired several generations of National Lawyers Guild members since 1937, and it is a goal worth fighting for today, and in the future. We welcome and encourage your support, ideas, and your energy in finding ways to shape that future. - Prof. Peter Erlinder, NLG past-President, 1993-97