Lawyers and Radicals

FOLLOW a lawyer, and he'll probably lead you to money. Of 300,000 American lawyers, only 4000 make their living doing the legal work of the 33 million people who fall below the poverty line. Nearly three-quarters of US attorneys serve the one quarter of the population with incomes above $10,000 a year.

Marlise James's book The People's Lawyers is a collection of interviews with poverty lawyers, civil rights lawyers, radical and minority lawyers. James includes the stars of the radical law set: William Kunstler, Charles Garry and Len Weinglass.

James has not done her job well. Her subjects are vital, informed and combative, but she fails to find the proper setting for them. Overplaying journalistic reserve, she confines her comments to less than twenty pages of general introduction and conclusion, without ever identifying the main themes of her conversations. She asks the same questions in the same order, sets up her attorneys for the joust but never allows them to begin combat with each other. Taken out of the courtroom and isolated from their opponents all too often they flail at air.

But People's Lawyers is interesting, if not engrossing, as a chronicle of the shearing off of some of America's privileged caste from the mainstream of their profession.

The people's lawyers had their origin in the labor movement and in pacifism. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the most venerable rights organization in the U.S., evolved from a group of lawyers who defended pacificsts during the First World War. After the War, ACLU turned its attention to the emergent labor unions, and then to the New Deal reformers. By the next world war, it moved towards the right. After the 1939 Nazi-Soviet non-agression pact, ACLU banned Communists from its staff, thus splitting its ranks and spawning other groups.

The radical lawyers interviewed by James received their original inspiration from the Southern civil rights crusades, the Cesar Chavez-type labor movement, or community work. Many are graduates of top law schools, like Harvard, Yale and Columbia.

Len Weinglass, who represented Tom Hayden at the 1969 Chicago conspiracy trial and Anthony Russo in the Pentagon Papers case, was radicalized through community involvement in Newark, New Jersey.

As a college student in Washington, D.C., Weinglass worked on Capitol Hill as the operator of a private elevator car for then-Vice-President Nixon and Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson (Although he never got to know Johnson, Weinglass struck up a sort of friendship with Nixon. "Nixon and I used to talk a lot. He was very nice." Questioned by reporters after the Chicago trial, Nixon admitted that he remembered Weinglass.)

After ROTC training during college, Weinglass went to Yale Law School, served in the air force as a legal officer, and set up his own practice in Newark. There he met Hayden and was introduced into radical law when he took the case of John Butenko, an engineer who was charged with espionage. Since then, Weinglass has represented Imamu Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Newark Mayor Kenneth Gibson.

Weinglass believes the court system has potential value. "If there were Justice Douglases sitting on every one of the twelve thousand judicial spots that there are in the country, I think the court system would be pretty good," he told James.

But many of his colleagues do not share his faith. Often, the radical lawyer is a man who protests the inadequacy of his own training in a world which is willing to reward him for it.

"I think there is something wrong with everyone who becomes a lawyer. There's some paranoia, some cowardice, some lack of courage or self-identification, some flaw in a person's contribution that makes him become a lawyer," said one radical San Francisco attorney.

The rights lawyer perceives himself as a technician, taking advantage of accidental quirks in the legal system. "While doing civil liberties work it became clear to me that whenever people tried to take advantage of the rules of the game the system had laid down in order to achieve peaceful change, the rules of the game tightened up," said New York attorney Henry diSuvero.

Mike Kennedy, a San Francisco lawyer, states flatly, "I look at the court system with total skepticism. Not a chance that it can be reformed." Kennedy holds that the basic principles of the court system have come into conflict with the realities of American life. "We're at a time now when the ideology of bourgeois liberalism is, in many cases, contrary to the interests of the American ruling class. If you really enforce the First and Fourth Amendments, people get away with a lot."

ONE OF the newest developments in the legal profession is the idea of the law commune--lawyers, para-legal workers and clerical workers forming collective practices, splitting fees usually on the basis of need. Communes have so far met with little success. "With the profit motive out of the picture, the people in the commune found that the lawyers were competing for the big cases, and the ego-satisfaction that their attendant publicity could bring," James writes of one commune.

Law school enrollments have doubled between 1961 and 1971, and law schools now turn away half of their applicants. James believes that this expansion of the profession and a corresponding contraction in job opportunities for attorneys will drive more lawyers into communes and public interest firms, as "the only employment alternative open" to them. It is more likely that lawyers will be driven to give up their non-paying clients, and spend more time working for themselves as their hourly wages drop. In addition, the dismantling of the Office of Economic Opportunity and its controversial Legal Services program will strangle financial support for the poverty lawyers.

Haywood Burns of the National Conference of Black Lawyers said, "I think that major change will come about in the law only when it comes about in society, and I'm afraid the change we're in for now is a wave of repression. It is not coming. It is here."