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

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.