Who is the National Lawyers Guild?

Scroll down or click these links to:

• Read specifically about the Detroit & MI Chapter

• Read the NLG Timeline

• Guild Objectives from the NLG Constitution + NLG Committees

”…to the end that human rights and the rights of ecosystems shall be regarded as more sacred than property interests.” — from Preamble to the NLG Constitution

Founded in 1937, the National Lawyers Guild (“NLG” or “the Guild”) was the nation’s first racially integrated bar association. Indeed, the founding of the NLG was prompted by the American Bar Association’s (ABA’s) flagrant refusal to admit lawyers of color into its membership.  Progressive lawyers and jurists joined together to fight for the reconstruction of legal values and to openly commit to work for human rights over property rights.

At its initial convention, the Guild passed resolutions demanding anti-lynching legislation, an end to restricted suffrage, and more public defenders. The Guild supported labor’s right to collective bargaining and to organize “free from employer interference of any kind;” supported a full-scale Social Security program; and called on the federal government to create neighborhood “legal aid bureaus” to provide full services for people unable to afford legal fees. The Guild is the oldest and most extensive network of public interest and human rights activists working within the legal system. 

The first “Guild lawyers” supported the New Deal, assisted the emerging industrial labor movement, and opposed racial segregation in the ABA and the larger society. The Guild was the first national bar association to oppose the Death Penalty and, for decades, has supported revolutionary international liberation struggles.

During its more than 85 year history, the NLG's mission and work has been openly and proudly anti-racist, anti-capitalist, anti-fascist, and anti-imperialist.

Through its membership of thousands of legal activists organized through 15+ national committees, 65+ local chapters, and 125+ law school chapters, the Guild fights for economic and social justice; and against oppression and discrimination based on race, ethnicity, immigration status, class, gender, or sexual orientation.  By stating clearly that …human rights shall be held more sacred than property interests, the NLG Preamble recognizes that economic and social needs should also be considered “rights”, and that these rights often conflict with the interests of propertied elites in all nations.

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. We have always seen questions of economic and social class as inextricably intertwined with most domestic and international justice issues.

Right to Protest

The Guild is well known for defending the rights of protesters, and providing legal representation and support for social justice movements through our Mass Defense and Legal Observer Programs.

NLG Legal Observers are volunteers who are trained to observe and document police actions during protests. The NLG Legal Observer (LO) program was formed in 1968 in New York City to respond to repression of protests at Columbia University and of ongoing citywide protests that were part of the anti-war and civil rights movements. Around the same time, student NLG members formed a legal response to the mass arrests of demonstrators at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The overall program is a component of the Guild’s Mass Defense Committee, and autonomous regional programs are run by respective chapters.

Guild Chapters provide comprehensive legal support for protest movements by hosting Know Your Rights trainings, tracking arrestees through the legal system, and providing free attorneys for protest-related cases.

In addition to legally challenging repressive state and corporate actions intended to harm social justice protesters and movements, the NLG also puts out public critiques and condemnations of those actions, and issues statements of solidarity with protests and movements fighting for social justice in the U.S. and around the world.

Legal Education

Unlike many bar associations, the NLG allows current law students to become full members of the organization. We have over 120 law school chapters across the country, and students are a vibrant part of our membership. Because law school is designed to discourage critical political thinking and isolate its pupils from social movements, the Guild has resolved to change the practice and policies of legal education. To support law students, Guild members have created the NLG Radical Law Student Project as “a valuable tool to help students survive and thrive in law school, and go on to pursue social justice careers” (Marjory Cohn).

Every year the NLG generates Dis-orientation Manuals, in the same vein, to help law students maintain their political values and goals despite law school! Law students annually host Dis-orientation activities to organize with their fellow NLG students. 

Members

From its inception, the Guild welcomed into its ranks all members of the profession without regard to race, gender, or ethnic identity; it was the first national legal professional association to do so.

Consistent with its commitment to ensuring fairness and equality for all people, law students, non-lawyer legal workers, and jailhouse lawyers (imprisoned legal experts) are full members. The Guild elected its first African-American president in the early 1950s, its first female president in the 1960s, its first legal worker president in 1996, and its first Arab-American president in 2020.

Folks who are in jail or prison who do legal work to defend themselves or their incarcerated comrades are known as “Jailhouse Lawyers.” They are welcome members of the National Lawyers Guild, as is everyone who fights for freedom and liberation.

Structure

The Guild is a local and 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, and support each other on a grassroots level. Our committee structure makes it possible to play a role, nationally, in political, social justice, and legal issues. NLG Chapters can be found in most states, all major cities, and more than 120 law school campuses.

Every year, the NLG has the Law For the People Convention. We hold two plenaries in which members discuss programmatic priorities, often in the form of resolutions. We also update our governing documents, our bylaws, and constitution. Here is the Program/Journal from the 2011 Convention, which was held in Philadelphia. (Check it out!)

Internationalist

From its founding in 1937, the National Lawyers Guild has maintained an internationalist perspective, and international work has been a critical focus for the organization and its members.

The Guild was active in the fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War and in World War II. Guild lawyers participated in the creation of the United Nations and in the prosecution of IG Farben, the German chemical corporation which played an active role in the Holocaust.

The Guild opposed the paranoia and furor of the Cold War, and many Guild lawyers used their skills to defend immigrants, labor activists, and others accused of “subversion.” Later Guild work centered on support for national liberation movements (such as those in Vietnam and South Africa), the eradication of nuclear weapons, and the support of international legal principles and institutions which further “… the end that human rights shall be regarded as more sacred than property rights.”

As lawyers, law students, and legal activists, we seek to change U.S. foreign policy that threatens rather than engages, or is based on a model of domination rather than respect. The Guild provides assistance and solidarity to movements in the United States and abroad that work for social justice in this increasingly interconnected world.

Presently, subcommittees or on-going projects exist for Cuba, Gaza, Korea,  Africa, the Philippines, Haiti, Task Force for the Americas, and the United Nations. The International Committee has also joined with the Guild’s Labor and Employment Committee to form the International Labor Justice Working Group. Working Groups take on current issues such as Torture, the Afghanistan War, Justice for Vietnamese Agent Orange Victims, and preserving Japan’s Peace Constitution Article 9. Numerous white papers and legal materials are prepared each year.

Since the turn of the 21st century, the International Committee has organized numerous delegations to Haiti, Philippines, El Salvador, Palestine, Venezuela, Lebanon, North and South Korea, Cuba, and Mexico; and International Committee members participated in the UN World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa in 2001 and its follow up meeting in 2009.

The Guild’s membership has passed numerous resolutions on international issues, including Ending Puerto Rican Colonialism, Ending the Occupation in Gaza, Ending Interference in Haitian Elections, Supporting Normalization of US-Cuba Relations, Condemning US Funding to Destabilize Progressive Governments, Supporting Health Workers in the Philippines, and Boycott and Divestment from Israel.

Prisoner Human Rights & Political Prisoners

Guild attorneys, law students, and legal workers have always represented and supported U.S.-held political prisoners and prisoners of war, and fought for their release. These political prisoners include Mumia Abu-Jamal, the MOVE 9, Leonard Peltier, Rafael Cancel Miranda, Oscar Lopez Rivera, Marius Mason, Rasmea Odeh, and the Cuban Five. Some political prisoners are or have been Guild members, including Mumia Abu-Jamal and the late Lynne Stewart, and many were targeted by the F.B.I.’s COINTELPRO. Guild members are active in working for the freedom of u.s. held political prisoners. A Guild legal worker recently made this Linktre.ee to help build public pressure in the ongoing struggles to Free U.S.-held Political Prisoners.

Guild attorneys, in 2011 and 2013, supported and publicized a mass hunger strike of over 30,000 prisoners, organized across racial lines by men enduring decades of extreme isolation. Strikers stopped eating for 60 days to end California’s crushing policy of long-term solitary confinement.  In 2012, the Center for Constitutional Rights and other Guild attorneys took on the lawsuit, Ashker v. Governor of CA, initially filed by two of the hunger strike organizers. The prisoner-led movement led to thousands of people being released from solitary after years of torture. The Ashker case continues in 2021, challenging the CA prison system’s use of confidential information to keep people in solitary and deny them parole.

The Detroit & Michigan National Lawyers Guild endorsed the Oct 2021 “Spirit of Mandela” International Tribunal which successfully charged the U.S. government, its states, and specific agencies, with human and civil rights violations against Black, Brown, and Indigenous people. Full Verdict The Tribunal was initiated by the National Jericho Movement which aims to bring international attention to the United States violations of u.s. held Political Prisoners’ human rights.

Prison and Police Abolition

The NLG is committed to the dismantling and abolition of all aspects of systems and institutions that support, condone, create, fill, or protect prisons, jails, police lock ups, juvenile detention facilities, immigration detention centers, involuntary psychiatric treatment centers, and other institutional settings in which people are held against their will.

The NLG’s 2015 Resolution Supporting the Abolition of Prisons means we are committed to working toward a world in which prisons are obsolete. This work includes supporting the human rights and organizing of prisoners, as well as calls to support their strategies and demands. We also support grassroots organizing efforts, policy initiatives, and litigation to: de-fund and close prisons and redirect prison and policing budgets into social and human services and re­-entry support; legalize drug use and sex work; release prisoners serving life without parole and other inhumane sentences; end the use of solitary confinement; and prevent new prison construction.

In 2020, NLG members passed a Resolution Supporting the Abolition of Policing submitted by the NLG Anti-Racism Committee. Also, we passed a Resolution on Non-Collaboration with Grand Juries.

The NLG will continue, as it always has, to struggle and litigate against the violence of police and the system of white supremacy from which it operates.

Detroit & Michigan Chapter, National Lawyers Guild

Detroit attorneys were among the founding members of the National Lawyers Guild in 1937. Two of these attorneys, Maurice Sugar and Ernest Goodman, began a firm that was active in defending workers, unions such as the United Auto Workers, and representing the oppressed (particularly by the police) Black community. Ernest went on to found Goodman, Eden, Crockett, Millender and Bedrosian,  the first racially integrated law firm in the country, and included as partners civil rights leaders and activists such as George Crockett, Jr., Bob Millender, and Claudia Morcom.

The targeting and hyper-suspicion whipped up by McCarthyism in the 1950s dealt a heavy blow. Bitter political fights brewed, and the membership was devastated. Only a small handful of lawyers joined the Detroit Chapter over the next several years.

In 1961, the Chapter was revitalized. During the Guild Convention in Detroit, Len Holt, a remarkable civil rights lawyer from Virginia, appealed to the Guild to send lawyers to assist the growing civil rights struggle in the South.  Hundreds of Guild lawyers – many from Detroit – went South in 1964 for Freedom Summer. This organizing effort energized and strengthened the Detroit Chapter.

The Chapter grew through the 1960s and was very active in providing support and legal representation for people in the civil rights, Black power, anti-war youth, and revolutionary union movements, and the 1967 Detroit rebellion.

After 1967, two young lawyers electrified the Chapter and the community – Ken Cockrel and Justin Ravitz.  Working with many other Guild lawyers, including current board member Bill Goodman, they revolutionized the jury pools and openly exposed racism on the bench. Major trials dramatized racism and police brutality – New Bethel Church, the Detroit Panther 15, the Detroit Police Department’s STRESS unit, and the Wayne County Jail conditions case. Thousands of anti-Viet Nam war demonstrators were represented by Guild members.

After the historic 1971 Attica prison rebellion, the Detroit NLG organized many lawyers who went to Buffalo, New York to represent the indicted Attica Brothers. Shango Bahati Kakawana (Bernard Stroble) was the lead Attica defendant, and his case resulted in a dramatic acquittal due to the defense work of Guild attorneys Ernie Goodman, Haywood Burns, Linda Borus, and Bill Goodman, and most importantly, of Shango himself. Shango's victory broke the back of the misbegotten Attica prosecutions. Here is the 1992 National Lawyers Guild 55th Anniversary Dinner Journal from NYC-NLG, honoring the Attica Brothers.

In 1971, Guild attorneys filed a lawsuit challenging the conditions in the Wayne County Jail - and the jail is still monitored through that case over 50 years later. In the 1980s, members of the Guild opened up Michigan prisons to scrutiny. In 2009, a team led by Guild member Deb LaBelle won a $100 million verdict against the Michigan Department of Corrections on behalf of hundreds of women in MI prisons who’d been sexually abused by guards and staff in incidents beginning in the 1990’s.

Guild members have always fought for the right for people to engage in civil disobedience and represented the people who have. For instance, the Detroit NLG was there for hundreds of people arrested outside of B-52 cruise missile manufacturer, Williams International, in Pontiac Michigan in the 1980’s. Dozens went to jail for civil contempt for refusing, as a matter of conscience, to stop protesting the bomb maker.

In 1995, during the Newspaper Guild strike against the Detroit News and The Free Press, (operating as a “Joint Operating Agreement” under corporate ownership of Gannett), many Guild member attorneys worked with labor lawyers and activists as Legal Observers and defense lawyers to defend over 1,000 strikers charged with crimes and subjected to substantial violence. Tens of thousands of progressive unionists and others came out, over a period of months, and Guild members worked vigorously to represent them. Significantly, the wonderful current work of NLG-affiliated  Sugar Law Center for Economic and Social Justice  continues the very fight for workers rights that characterized the work of Maurice Sugar when the Guild was founded in 1937.

Guild attorneys provided direct representation of and support for the fight against the anti-democratic and unconstitutional Emergency Manager law; and continue in the fight for affordable and clean water in Detroit and Flint.

In 2004, our Chapter was active as Legal Observers and jail support for the Ferguson Uprising, after a white Ferguson Missouri police officer killed young Mike Brown, a Black unarmed 18 year old.

In early 2018, we provided legal support for the resistance to neo-Nazi and white supremacist Richard Spencer;s visit to Michigan State University. Alt-right groups who were responsible for the violence in Charlottesville were making public plans on social media to mobilize a big presence from around the country to come to Lansing. The Chapter pulled together a comprehensive system of legal support from the streets to the courts - legal observers, jail support on and offsite, know your rights programming, legal representation, and court support. A small group of anti-racist MSU students were arrested, but the protests sent Spencer away with his tail between his legs.

In 2019, during the Democratic debates in Detroit, Movimiento Cosecha Michigan organized several hundred people to march in downtown Detroit, demanding an end to all detention and deportations on [the President’s] Day 1, immediate legalization for all 11 million undocumented immigrants, and family reunification for all. To amplify the urgency of the demands, twenty-one allies sat in the road in front of the Windsor-Detroit Tunnel, blocking traffic going to Canada and traffic coming into the US, and were arrested by Detroit Police and US Border and Customs Patrol. The NLG had Legal Observers on site and represented the people arrested and charged.

During and since the George Floyd uprising in 2020, the Detroit & Michigan Chapter has coordinated legal support to the Black Lives Matter movement, and defense for over 400 protesters in Detroit and around the state. Legal Observers were present for over 100 consecutive days of racial justice marches in Detroit, and at many protest in other parts of Michigan. Detroit Guild attorneys and their activist clients, through a Preliminary Injunction in Detroit Will Breathe vs. City of Detroit, have successfully stopped the Detroit police from using the violent tactics and baseless mass arrests against protesters that they used to during the summer of 2020.

Brief NLG Timeline

1930s and 40s

NLG lawyers helped organize the United Auto Workers (UAW), the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and supported the New Deal in the face of determined American Bar Association opposition. In the 1940s, Guild lawyers fought against fascists in the Spanish Civil War and WW II, and helped prosecute Nazis at Nuremberg.

Guild lawyers fought racial discrimination in cases such as Hansberry v. Lee, the case that struck down segregationist Jim Crow laws in Chicago (see Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun).

The Guild was one of the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) selected by the U.S. Government to officially represent the American people at the founding of the United Nations in 1945.  NLG members helped draft model labor and social security legislation and 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).

Guild members founded the first national plaintiffs personal injury bar association that became the American Trial Lawyers Association (ATLA). The NLG set up storefront neighborhood law offices for low-income clients that became the model for the community-based offices of the Legal Services Corporation.

After World War II, the Guild was outspoken in its opposition to the nuclear arms race and urged a ban on all such weapons.

Also, the NLG fought vigorously against the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 which rolled back many protections the labor movement had secured a decade earlier under the Wagner Act.

During the McCarthy era (late 1940s - 1950s)

Guild attorneys represented people hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) of the 1940s-1950s, and those illegally prosecuted under the Smith Act (outlawed organizations presumed to be "conspiring to advocate and overthrow the U.S. government by force and violence"). They represented the Hollywood Ten, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, and thousands of other victims of the anti-communist madness.

Unlike all other national civil liberties groups and bar associations, the Guild refused to require “loyalty oaths” of its members; it was therefore labeled “subversive” and targeted by the US Justice Department. The NLG was openly critical of the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover, who ordered covert actions against the Guild— including several burglaries of the NLG office. The Guild further attracted FBI attention when it drafted a report on FBI surveillance practices in 1949, showing the FBI was engaged in warrantless wiretapping, illegal mail covers, and warrantless entries. The Guild’s criticisms of the FBI infuriated Hoover and led to decades of harassment and repression. 

This period in the Guild’s history provided valuable experience in defending First Amendment rights and understanding the dangers of “political profiling.”

1960s

The Guild set up offices in the South and organized thousands of volunteer lawyers and law students to support the Civil Rights Movement. Student chapters of the NLG were formed in many cities. Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) organizer, Lawrence Guyot, explained that the Guild’s role in the South paralleled the community-oriented empowerment that guided SNCC. “The Lawyers Guild simply lived up to its commitment to represent us as best as it could on our recommendation …It never encouraged a litigation that we did not encourage or did not want to participate in. It never advocated any ideas independent of what we were advocating.

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 local law enforcement-Ku Klux Klan members. (The story was  fictionalized in the film Mississippi Burning.)  Guild attorneys also defended thousands of civil rights activists who were arrested for exercising basic rights. NLG-initiated lawsuits worked to dismantle the Jim Crow southern legal system, brought the Kennedy Justice Department directly into the Civil Rights struggle in Mississippi, and challenged the seating of the all-white Mississippi delegation at the 1964 Democratic Convention.

Perhaps the most significant legal tactic that emerged during this era of civil rights lawyering was the “omnibus integration” suit. In sharp contrast to the piecemeal approach that had previously characterized civil rights litigation, the omnibus suit attacked the all-encompassing nature of segregation. Devised by Guild lawyers Len Holt and Ernest Jackson during a case they argued in Danville, Virginia, the omnibus suit mirrored the direct-action organizing of many movement activists. As NLG attorney Len Holt described, “instead of just seeking to integrate a library [for example] it attacks racial discrimination in the cemetery, swimming pool, public hospital, dog pound, parks, auditoriums, buses, public housing… you name it.” More than twenty public officials could potentially be named in just a single litigation.

late 1960s - early 1970s

NLG members continued to provide legal support to emerging social movements. Guild members represented Vietnam War draft resisters, antiwar activists, and the Chicago 7 after the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention. NLG offices in Asia represented GIs who opposed the war.

The NLG deeply involved in the Black and Puerto Rican liberation movements, and the founding of several public interest law firms, including the Center for Constitutional Rights, in New York, and the Instituto Puertorriqueño De Derechos Civiles, in San Juan.

Guild attorneys defended FBI-targeted members of the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement, and the Puerto Rican independence movement, and helped expose illegal F.B.I and C.I.A. surveillance, infiltration and disruption tactics, including the F.B.I.’s Counter Intelligence Program, COINTELPRO. The F.B.I.’s targeting included assassinations of young Black and American Indian activists, frame-ups leading to long prison sentences, and vicious efforts to isolate activists and break up organizations with infiltration and lies. COINTELPRO tactics were detailed in U.S. Senate “Church Commission” hearings in 1975-76, which led to enactment of the Freedom of Information Act and specific limitations on federal investigative power. Guild attorneys still support COINTELPRO survivors who have been in prison for decades.

Throughout the Vietnam War, the Guild offered legal assistance to people opposed to the war for political, religious, or moral reasons. They published The New Draft Law: A Manual for Counselors and Lawyers .

Into the 1970s, Guild attorneys established 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 which require Due Process protections; and, Monell v. Dept. of Public Services, which held municipalities liable for brutal police officers.

The NLG defended prisoners who rose up to protest the conditions at Attica and provided legal counsel for Wounded Knee activists when the Oglala Sioux asserted their sovereignty. 

Guild members argued U.S. v. U.S. District Court, the Supreme Court case that established that Nixon could not wiretap activists without a warrant and could not ignore the Bill of Rights in the name of “national security.” This ultimately  led to the Watergate hearings and Nixon’s resignation.

In the 1970s, the Guild was actively involved in the struggles for women's and gay rights and in the fight for affirmative action in education and employment, working in coalition with other civil rights and legal organizations in the fight to preserve the gains made in the Bakke case. 

The NLG has long supported (and still supports) self-determination for Palestine and began the ongoing fight against the blockade of Cuba.  The NLG opposed apartheid in South Africa at a time when the U.S. Government still called Nelson Mandela a “terrorist” and (later in 1985) helped form Lawyers Against Apartheid.

The NLG supports the Puerto Rican struggle for self-determination and independence. Guild members’ decades-long history of solidarity encompasses the establishment of the Puerto Rico Legal Project in the 1970s and work for the release of Puerto Rican political prisoners, including the Five Nationalists of the 1954 attack on the House of Representatives and Oscar López Rivera. Program from the NLG National Convention held in Puerto Rico in October, 2013.

NLG members have founded important civil rights and human rights institutions that continue to do critical work today, such as the Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute (1965) in Berkeley, Center for Constitutional Rights (1966), the National Conference of Black Lawyers (1968), People’s Law Office (1969) in Chicago,  Peoples College of Law (“the Guild Law School”, 1974) in Los Angeles, and going beyond the 1970s: Sugar Law Center for Economic and Social Justice (1991) in Detroit,  Civil Liberties Defense Center (2003) in Eugene OR, and Abolitionist Law Center in Pittsburgh & Philadelphia PA. 

1980s

Members joined the struggle for recognition of the United Farm Workers, supported movements for LGBT rights, and provided legal assistance to the anti-nuclear struggle.

The Guild pioneered the “necessity defense” and began using international law to support the anti-nuclear movement and challenge the use of nuclear weapons. 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 Guild was a leader in organizing demands for affirmative action in law schools and defending gains when courts became vehicles of organized backlash.

The NLG sent a delegation to Northern Ireland calling for an end to British domination and supported the demands of IRA hunger strikers.

A new generation of Guild legal activists organized support for groups opposing U.S. intervention in Central America. It also forged innovative strategies for advancing domestic and international human rights and filed federal suits, including Sanchez-Espinoza v Reagan, aimed at stopping the U.S.-sponsored secret war against Nicaragua.

The Guild worked with other organizations to file a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of U.S. Treasury Department regulations restricting travel to Cuba, and flow of literature from Cuba.

The NLG National Immigration Project began working systematically on immigration issues, spurred by the need to represent Central American refugees and asylum activists fleeing U.S.-sponsored terror in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Guild lawyers pioneered, based on early 19th Century federal statutes, legal theories for holding foreign human rights violators accountable in U.S. courts, The Guild organized “People’s Tribunals” to expose the illegality of U.S. intervention in Central America (intervention that became known as the “Iran-Contra” scandal).

In 1985 Guild activist Paul Albert formed the National Lawyers Guild AIDS Network (NGLAN) in response to the inadequate legal services many persons with AIDS were experiencing at that time. NGLAN provided legal assistance to people with HIV and to AIDS service organizations around the country through a network of attorneys and legal workers, advocated for progressive public policy, and educated individuals and groups about HIV and the law, creating the first legal practice manual on the HIV/AIDS crisis.

In 1989, the Guild prevailed in a lawsuit against the FBI for illegal political surveillance of legal activist organizations. The suit, which had been filed in 1977, revealed the extent to which the government had been spying on the NLG. Since 1941, the FBI had used over 1,000 informants to report on NLG activities, disrupt Guild meetings and conferences, and infiltrate policy-making bodies of chapters and the national organization. Under the 1989 settlement, the FBI turned over copies of roughly 400,000 pages of its files on the Guild, which are now available at the Tamiment Library at New York University. 

The Guild published the first major work on sexual orientation and the law.

1990s and early 21st century

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. blockade of Cuba, and began to define a new civil rights agenda including the right to employment, education, housing and health care.

In 1991, Guild attorneys successfully sued the FBI in Judi Bari v the FBI (aka Earth First! vs the FBI) for civil rights violations against Earth First! organizer Judi Bari, after a bomb attempt on her life.

As a founding United Nations-Non-Governmental Organization, the Guild participated in the 50th anniversary of the UN. 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.

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 the 1996 Anti-Terrorism Act.

The intertwining of governmental power with the influence of corporations, epitomized by the ENRON debacle, confirmed the challenge of the NLG’s 1998 Convention theme, “Fighting Corporate Power.”

In 1999, the Guild established the NLG-National Police Accountability Project (NPAP) “with the intent of helping end police abuse of authority and to provide support for grassroots and victims’ organizations combating police misconduct.”

The NLG has provided legal support for environmental and animal rights movements for decades. When the FBI began investigating these activists in the late 1990s, the NLG provided lawyers, created the Know Your Rights resource Operation Backfire, and set up a national Green Scare hotline.

The Guild, having long-analyzed the impact of “globalization” on human rights and the environment, opposed NAFTA, and helped build and support the growing movement for “globalization of justice.”  Moving into the 21st Century, the Guild defended anti-globalization, environmental, and labor rights activists from Seattle, to D.C., to Miami, to L.A. 

Guild members played an active role in encouraging cross-border labor organizing and exposing abuses in the maquiladoras on the U.S.-Mexico Border. The NLG’s Project for Human, Economic and Environmental Defense (HEED) and Committee on Corporations, the Constitution & Human Rights focus specifically on “globalization” issues.

The Guild helped fight and support movements against the seizure of increased executive power, the huge buildup of military might, the attack on civil liberties after the 9-11 tragedy, devastating U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the re-creation of McCarthy-esque “anti-terrorism” measures.

2000’s

The U.S. began the 21st century with “new” U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Guild members could be found working in every aspect of anti-war resistance, and for the movements and legal actions in solidarity and defense of its victims. Guild attorneys continue that work today, which includes representing and fighting for release of men who were profiled in the US “War on Terror;” snatched from their homes in the early 2000’s from various nations (incl. Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Bosnia); and severely tortured and imprisoned, most without charge, in the notorious U.S.-run Guantanamo Bay prison.

Guild members lobbied Congress and worked with the House Judiciary Committee in an effort to turn back the worst aspects of the 2001 USA PATRIOT Act. Guild members also filed the first challenges to the detention of prisoners from Afghanistan, and to the use of military tribunals.

The Guild has supported cases against surveillance by the National Security Agency and the US Army, and engaged in many other projects that directly challenged government and corporate practices.

When Occupy encampments spread across the country in 2011, the NLG was there to offer legal support.

After the election of Donald Trump, the NLG assisted with the organization of legal support for the massive protests on inauguration day, and worked with the over 200 people mass arrested by D.C. police on January 20, 2016. 

The NLG has been supporting and representing environmental, animal rights, racial justice, and information activists, as well as whistleblowers, anarchists, and Muslims targeted by the US government.

Our legal support for environmental activism continued through the many years of resistance to the Keystone XL pipeline, into the days of the #NoDAPL demonstrations at Standing Rock. Guild members traveled to North Dakota to assist Water Protectors and Indigenous legal workers, eventually forming the Water Protector Legal Collective. NLG members have also been actively involved in the resistance to oil and gas pipelines across the country, including Louisiana, Minnesota, North Dakota, Virginia, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Recently, Guild members have helped form Pipeline Legal Action Network (PLAN) to facilitate and support legal planning for activists resisting the Line 3 pipeline. (This is a great resource by PLAN, “Protecting Our Water - Legal Strategies for Movement Activists.”)

In 2018, the NLG membership voted to add the “rights of ecosystems” to our mission statement, in recognition of the long history of the Guild’s work with environmental movements.

In 2019, the NLG helped form a coalition called Protect the Protest. Its purpose is to defend activists from corporations, individuals, and law firms who attempt to silence their critics by filing Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs).

In 2020, the NLG played a central role after the police murder of George Floyd, providing legal representation to 20,000 arrestees nationwide during the uprising. Guild staff and members set up legal and jail support hotlines across the country, provided training and education to thousands of organizers and attorneys, and assisted activists targeted by federal prosecution and grand jury investigations. Additionally, with police departments throughout the country responding to Black Lives Matter protests with massive amounts of  violence and mass arrests without probable cause, Guild attorneys are litigating several civil rights suits enjoining police departments from continuing to use violent tactics against protesters and NLG Legal Observers, including in Detroit, where Guild attorneys obtained a Preliminary Injunction.

Guild members continue, as they always have, to defend protesters falsely charged in response to their political organizing and to people punished for struggling on behalf of their communities for liberation.

From the Constitution of the National Lawyers Guild

“ …lawyers, law students, legal workers and jailhouse lawyers… in the service of the people, to the end that human rights and the rights of ecosystems shall be regarded as more sacred than property interests.” -Preamble to the NLG Constitution

The objectives of the organization shall be to:

• Aid in making the United States and the State Constitutions and law and the administrative and judicial agencies of government responsive to the will of the American people;

• Protect and foster our democratic institutions and civil rights and liberties of all people;

• Aid in the establishment of governmental and professional agencies to supply adequate legal services to all who are in need and cannot obtain it;

• Promote justice in the administration of the law;

• Aid in the adoption of laws for the economic and social welfare of the people;

• Keep the people informed upon legal matters affecting the public interest;

• Encourage, in the study of law, a consideration of the social and economic aspects of the law;

• Improve the ethical standards which must guide the lawyer in the performance of their professional and social duties; and;

• Promote world unity through collaboration among the Bars of members of the United Nations.

NLG Committees

NLG Labor & Employment Committee

NLG International Committee

National Immigration Project

National Police Accountability Project

NLG Environmental Justice Committee

NLG Anti-Racism Committee

NLG Disability Justice Committee

NLG Drug Policy Committee

NLG Environmental Justice Committee

NLG Housing & Homelessness Committee

NLG Mass Defense Committee

NLG Mass Incarceration Committee

NLG Military Law Task Force

NLG Queer Caucus

The United People of Color Caucus (TUPOCC)