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The National Lawyers Guild is a radical leftist Bar Association in the United States for lawyers and related professions. It was founded in 1937 as an alternative to the American Bar Association, which was segregated (see racial segregation) at that time. The NLG is made up of national projects, committees and local chapters across the country. The NLG constitution states that one of its purposes is to establish a social and political movement "to the end that human rights shall be more sacred than property interests."
The NLG has been the vanguard of the Open Borders lobby. The NLG opposes the PATRIOT Act, corporate globalization, the WTO, and called for the adoption of "the Plan of Action from the 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance." The NLG supported convicted terrorist conspirator Lynne Stewart in her trial for transmitting terrorist communications from prison by Omar Abdel-Rahman, her former client and mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombings. The NLG condemned Stewart's conviction. Former NLG executive vice president Kit Gage replaced Sami al-Arian as president of the National Coalition to Protect Political Freedom (NCPPF) after al-Arian's February 2003 arrest on charges of funding terrorists.
Michael Avery, a law professor at Suffolk University Law School, is the current President of the National Lawyers Guild. President-Elect Marjorie Cohn, a law professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, will become President in October 2006.
The NLG is directly associated with the following bodies: Communist Party USA (CPUSA), the open borders lobby, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, Communities in Solidarity with Immigrant Workers, Refuse and Resist, Global Exchange. The NLG is also a member organization of United for Peace and Justice.
According to former Vice President, Chip Berlet:
"The cacophony at some meetings. . . debates featuring cadres from Leninist, Trotskyist, Stalinist, and Maoist groups, along with Marxists, anarchists, libertarians, and progressive independents - interacting with a preponderance of reluctant Democrats - all intertwined with multiple alternate identities as lawyers, legal workers, labor organizers, tribal sovereignty activists, civil liberties and civil rights advocates, environmentalists, feminists, gay men and lesbians, and people of color."
The NLG has received funding from the Open Society Institute, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Ford Foundation.
During the Cold War, the NLG was an active affiliate of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. In 1978, the CIA described the NLG as "one of the most useful Communist front organizations at the service of the Soviet Communist Party, has so consistently demonstrated its support of Moscow's foreign policy objectives, and is so tied in with other front organizations and the Communist press, that it is difficult for it to pretend that its judgments are fair or relevant to basic legal tenets."
External links
- Tamiment Library NLG Archive Administrative Files 1937-1969
- National Organization (National Office)
- Washington, D.C. Chapter
- Los Angeles Chapter
- San Francisco Chapter
- New York City Chapter
- Massachusetts Chapter
- Maryland Chapter
- Minnesota Chapter
- University of Wisconsin Chapter
- NLG National Immigration Project
- NLG Center for Democratic Communications
- Discover the Networks' Dossier on the National Lawyers Guild