Lawyers You'll Like: Putting Human Rights First

Michael Steven Smith

Smyrna Pr

Lawyers regularly take the lead in polls as the most unpopular of all professions, ahead, even, of bankers and journalists. But the lawyers featured in this book are different. The stories they tell and the cases they fought are admirable and often inspiring. They devoted their careers to representing victims of injustice rather than the rich and the privileged. Their clients included Martin Luther King and Angela Davis, the prisoners in the infamous massacre at Attica, people who suffered torture, police abuse, mass arrests, and segregation. They held the system to its promises of freedom of speech and assembly, the right to privacy, and equal justice for all, often exposing the ultimate incompatibility of democracy with capitalism. 
Combining profiles with engaging interviews, Lawyers for the Left will be of interest to progressives inside the legal profession, as well as a wider left increasingly aware that legal challenges are important in putting the brakes on an administration veering sharply to the right. It will also disabuse those who believe that God only invented lawyers so that politicians would have someone to look down upon. 
Lawyers profiled include: Charles Abourezk, Myron Beldock, Leonard Boudin, Haywood Burns, Bruce Wright, Ramsey Clark, Rhonda Copelon, Bill Goodman, Abdeen Jabara, Conrad Lynn, William Kunstler, Jim Lafferty, Holly Maguigan, Michael Ratner, Margaret Ratner Kunstler, Bill Schaap, Lynne Stewart, Jan Susler, Michael Tigar, Leonard Weinglass, Peter Weiss, Mel Wulf, Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, Victor Rabinowitz.

Lawyers for the Left: In the Courts, In the Streets, and On the Air

OR Books

In compelling detail two leading U.S. civil rights attorneys recount the extraordinary life and deliberate killing of the world's most storied revolutionary: Ernesto Che Guevara. Michael Ratner and Michael Steven Smith survey the extraordinary trajectory of Che's career, from an early politicization recounted in the Motorcycle Diaries, through meetings with his compañero Fidel Castro in Mexico, his vital role in the Cuban revolution, and his expeditions abroad to Africa and Latin America. But their focus is on Che's final days in Bolivia where, after months of struggle to spread the revolution begun in Havana, Che is wounded, captured and, soon after, executed. Bound and helpless, Che's last words to his killer, a soldier in the Bolivian Army, are "Remember, you are killing a man."Referencing internal U.S. government documentation, much of it never before published, Ratner and Smith bring their forensic skills as attorneys to analyze the evidence and present an irrefutable case that the CIA not only knew of and approved the execution, but was instrumental in making it happen. Cables from the agency disavowing any U.S. role in the murder were merely attempts to provide plausible deniability for the Johnson administration. The spirit of Che Guevara, as an icon and an inspiration, is as vibrant today as it ever was. News photographs of democracy protestors in the Middle East carrying his image have circulated the world in recent months. For anyone drawn to his remarkable life and its violent, unlawful end, Who Killed Che ? will engage, anger and educate.

Who Killed Che?: How the CIA Got Away with Murder

Michael Ratner

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Books by Michael Steven Smith

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Michael Steven Smith. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Lawyers You'll Like: Putting Human Rights First

Lawyers for the Left: In the Courts, In the Streets, and On the Air

Who Killed Che?: How the CIA Got Away with Murder