I’ve just resumed reading Jerold S. Auerbach’s “Unequal Justice: Lawyers and Social Change in America,” a social history of the modern legal profession in the US. It discusses the politics that motivated the formation of many of the institutions of modern law, including the large law firm, the bar associations, the American Association of Law Schools, the accredited law school and its curricular peculiarities, and the National Lawyers Guild. It also explores the origins of attitudes such as the idealization of business lawyers and contempt towards ambulance chasers and small-time criminal lawyers. The book is very good and I recommend it to anybody who wishes to understand the history of the legal profession, and in particular to individuals entering the legal profession who want to understand it.
Unequal Justice
May 25th, 2009About Arthur Kinoy
May 15th, 2009[whose name appears in the url of this blog.]
Arthur Kinoy
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Arthur Kinoy (September 29, 1920-September 19, 2003), was an attorney and progressive civil rights leader who became a professor of law at the Rutgers School of Law—Newark. He was one of the founders of the Center for Constitutional Rights and successfully argued before the Supreme Court of the United States.
Education
Kinoy was born on September 29, 1920 in New York City. He is an alumnus of Harvard University (A.B., 1941), where he graduated magna cum laude, and of Columbia University (LL.B., 1947). As a student at Harvard, Kinoy was a member of the national executive committee of the American Student Union.
Career as attorney
Kinoy was attorney for the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), labeled a Communist-controlled union by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS). He took an active part in the defense of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who were executed on June 19, 1953, after conviction of atomic espionage. Kinoy made two last-minute efforts to save the Rosenbergs from execution. In the 1950s, he was associated with the law firm of Donner, Kinoy & Perlin, attorneys for such left-wing groups as the Committee for Justice for Morton Sobell and Labor Youth League.
Kinoy was a member of the National Lawyers Guild, serving as national vice president in 1954. In 1964, Kinoy participated in a conference sponsored by the National Lawyers Guild’s Committee for Legal Assistance in the South, to brief attorneys on legal problems confronting civil rights demonstrators in Mississippi.
In 1964, Kinoy became a professor of law at Rutgers University. From 1964 to 1967 he was a partner in the law firm of Kunstler, Kunstler & Kinoy of New York City. He was counsel for the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Southern Conference Educational Fund. He was also affiliated with the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee. In 1966, he was a speaker at the annual dinner of the National Guardian newspaper. He did legal work for the American Civil Liberties Union.
In 1966, Kinoy was removed from a hearing of the House Committee on Un-American Activities and subsequently convicted of disorderly conduct. In 1968, the U.S. Court of Appeals overturned the conviction.
As the New York Times stated in its obituary, “Mr. Kinoy was involved in a number of landmark legal verdicts. In 1965, he successfully argued the case of Dombrowski v. Pfister before the Supreme Court, which empowered federal district court judges to stop enforcement of laws that had ‘a chilling effect’ on free speech. In a subsequent case, Dombrowski v. Senator Eastland, he established that the Counsel of the Senate Internal Security Committee was not immune from suits for violations of citizens’ civil rights. In 1972, the Supreme Court upheld his contention that President Richard M. Nixon had no ‘inherent power’ to wiretap domestic political organizations.”
Kinoy was one of the founders of the the Women’s Rights Law Reporter, the first legal periodical to focus exclusively on women’s rights.
Kinoy was married to Barbara S. Weber at his death. He had previously married and was divorced from Susan Knopf. He died on September 19, 2003 at the age of 82 at his home in New Jersey. He was survived by two children from his first marriage, as well as by his younger brother Ernest Kinoy, a prominent television and film screenwriter.
Radical Musical Interlude
May 15th, 2009Missing the point on terrorism
May 11th, 2009The ability of leading thinkers to miss obvious political points is no longer surprising to me, but I still find it worthwhile to make a note when it occurs.
I’m watching the commentary on disc 3 of The Battle of Algiers (Criterion Collection - 2004, I think). Christopher Isham, then Chief of Investigative Projects at ABC News, interviews counterterrorism experts Richard Clarke and Michael Sheehan. Richard Clarke is well-known and is regarded as a smart guy, a view that I share. Sheehan I’m not familiar with - he is a counterterrorism expert, formerly with the State Department.
They both miss the movie’s view of why the Algerian rebel group the FLN engaged in terror. They talk about the FLN using terrorism in order to provoke a harsh response against Algerian civilians, which in turn gets the civilians to mobilize against the French. In fact, what the film shows (and this is probably what actually happened) is the FLN retaliating against French terror in order to prevent an Algerian mob from getting itself slaughtered by seeking revenge in a disorganized way. The Algerians at first used violence against police and military targets. The French retaliated by planting a bomb in the Casbah, killing and injuring hundreds of people. The film shows the FLN persuading an angry mob not to seek revenge, by promising to avenge the terrorist attack with one of its own, which it does.
The FLN thus increased its legitimacy among the Algerians by carrying out the Algerian people’s revenge. It was already recognized as political leadership by virtue of cleaning up the Casbah, restoring Algerian self-respect, and becoming the de facto civil government of the Casbah. It then started carrying out acts of military resistance as a way of giving expression to the anti-colonial sentiment of the Algerians, and it conducted retaliatory terror attacks to give expression to the Algerians’ desire for revenge.
Imperialist thinkers, even smart ones like Clarke, have a hard time seeing organizations like the FLN as guerrilla movements doing the work of the colonized people. Instead they see them as terrorists. They tend to analyze them in terms of military tactics rather than politics. That’s why they attribute to the FLN the cynical motive that they are trying to bring French repression down on the population, using the Algerian people as pawns. Certainly guerrilla organizations are capable of having such cynical approaches to liberation, but the history of the period gives no suggestion that this was true in the FLN’s case. [Is this cynicism psychological projection by the counterinsurgent experts?]
The connection of all this to law is a paper I recently wrote for a class on internatinoal humanitarian law. I considered the question of international humanitarian law and guerrillas, which has been discussed in the legal journals, usually from a point of view similar to Clarke and Sheehan’s. Over and over, authors discussed the actions of guerrillas in terms of military tactics, some concluding that international humanitarian law, or certain proposed revisions of it, were too generous to guerrillas by prohibiting preferred counterinsurgency tactics; others argued that this was not so. But all focused on military tactics, ignoring the primacy of the political in guerrilla insurgencies. I focused on the political, using primarily Eqbal Ahmad’s writings and The Battle of Algiers. I argued that International Humanitarian Law is a boon to imperialists because it blunts the political weapons of democratic guerrilla movements.
Final word: To understand terrorism and guerrilla movements, get a copy of The Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad. I know of no sharper thinkers on this topic.
Well then… what do we have here?
May 11th, 2009There seems to be a dearth of blogs by/for/of radical lawyers, law students and other people involved in the world of law. This is an attempted remedy.
About me: I’ll be graduating from law school in less than a week. I’ve submitted my bar application to the great Commonwealth of Massachusetts - only time will tell if they accept it. I’ll aim to keep the posts here informal, in the style of Mondoweiss.
