2006
Disorientation
Not
on the big firm track? Learn more about your options
September
Actions Legal Support Volunteers
Volunteers
needed to fill various legal support roles throughout the weekend.
Student
Disorientation
Friday,
Sept. 16 from 2 to 6 PM at UDC-DCSL. Come learn what you are not taught in
law school.
National
Lawyers Guild - DCSL chapter presents MGM v. Grokster P2P panel
Hear
from the lawyers arguing this case and learn more about peer-to-peer file
sharing programs and their legal ramifications.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Guild members represented Vietnam War draft resisters, antiwar activists and the Chicago 7, after the 1968 Chicago 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” and 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 enactment of the Freedom of Information Act and other specific limitations on federal investigative power. The NLG supported self-determination for Palestine, opposed apartheid in South Africa, at a time when the U.S. Government still called Nelson Mandella a “terrorist” and began the fight against the blockade of Cuba. 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 Los Angeles.
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 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 and asylum activists fleeing U.S. sponsored “terror” Nicaragua and El Salvador. The Guild organized “People’s Tribunals” to expose the illegality of U.S. intervention in Central America that even more 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.
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. Legal theories for holding foreign human rights violators accountable in U.S. courts based on early 19th Century statutes were pioneered by Guild lawyers. 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 a buses 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.
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