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14.11.16 | About MR | LAW AND THE RISE OF CAPITALISM by Michael E. Tigar THE PEOPLE'S LAWYER: The Center for Constitutional Rights and the Fight for Social Justice, from Civil Rights to Guantánamo by Albert Ruben AMERICA'S ADDICTION TO TERRORISM by Henry A. Giroux THE REAWAKENING OF THE ARAB WORLD: Challenge and Change in the Aftermath of the Arab Spring by Samir Amin RUSSIA AND THE LONG TRANSITION FROM CAPITALISM TO SOCIALISM by Samir Amin GLOBAL NATO AND THE CATASTROPHIC FAILURE IN LIBYA by Horace Campbell SOCIALIST REGISTER 2016: The Politics of the Right THE RISE OF THE TEA PARTY: Political Discontent and Corporate Media in the Age of Obama by Anthony DiMaggio SAVE OUR UNIONS: Dispatches from a Movement in Distress by Steve Early THE ENDLESS CRISIS: How Monopoly-Finance Capital Produces Stagnation and Upheaval from the USA to China by John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney IMPERIALISM IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: Globalization, Super-Exploitation, and Capitalism's Final Crisis by John Smith |
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The Lawyers' Job Now -- History and Strategy by Michael E. Tigar Donald Trump and his allies have announced their agenda. It includes torture, denial of basic human rights, military action that violates the laws of war, racial injustice, misogyny, and xenophobia. What role and responsibility do we have? I am a lawyer, teacher, and writer. So I speak to those in my profession and those preparing to enter it. To repeat: don't mourn, organize. Some of my friends are saying, "Well, Trump and Co. will soon calm down, so I don't think we need to worry. After all, his rhetoric has already improved." Reminds me of Alexander Pope:
And along with Pope, I think, W.H. Auden:
The social currents that swept Donald Trump into office, along with a Congressional majority, are a bit like those forces and social conditions on which the Nazi Party relied in seeking and seizing power in 1932 and 1933. See John Mage's and my article: "The Reichstag Fire Trial, 1933-2008 : The Production of Law and History" (2009). It is heartening that this is the most-downloaded piece of my work on the Duke Law School website. For us, the point is that the destruction of all barriers against arbitrary power was made possible by the complacency and complicity of lawyers and judges. The majority of them stood by while the system they inherited was dismantled and even while their colleagues were persecuted. Buy and read Ingo Muller's masterful book Hitler's Justice: The Courts of the Third Reich. The American Bar Association has a travelling exhibit about some of these events, called "Lawyers Without Rights." If it comes to your town, go see it. In our town, we used the exhibit as the basis for a community meeting that drew in African-American and Hispanic communities. How We Got Here So lesson number one is: Those who do not understand history are condemned to repeat it, and the lessons grow more severe with each repetition. Over the past 50 years, I have litigated human rights violations. The violators have fought back with an ever-expanding list of legal devices that deny access to judicial review. These devices have been devised and used by every presidential administration of my adult lifetime -- Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, Obama. As we prepare to defend human rights, we already know what our opponent looks like. We have met him again and again. From the cold war ideology that brought us Vietnam through the interventionist policies of the 1980s and 1990s, and now into the perpetual battle for oil and treasure in the Middle East, we have learned what Hedy West taught us: "We'll be controlled by manipulated fear." I have been writing about some of these issues over the years. Much of my writing is on the Duke Law School website, where you can browse and download for free: <law.duke.edu/fac/tigar/bibliography/>. You can find my Monthly Review writing at <monthlyreview.org/author/michaeletigar/>. In domestic human rights cases, the abusers have claimed that the "political question" doctrine bars judicial examination of unlawful executive action. They also claim that uncovering illegality would compromise "state secrets." I dispelled these myths, based on law and history, in "The National Security State: the End of Separation of Powers" and "Resisting Wholesale Electronic Invasion of the Fourth Amendment" (keynote speech to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers). See also Law & the Rise of Capitalism (2d ed.). Our Path Forward Fortunately, some judges and courts have taken article 3 of the constitution seriously. For a hopeful sign, see Al-Shimari v. CACI, 2016 WL 6135246 (4th Cir. 2016). A short summary of the case and its issues is at <ccrjustice.org/home/what-we-do/our-cases/al-shimari-v-caci-et-al>. Students in the UNROW clinic at Washington College of Law prepared an amicus brief in the case, which my colleague Ali Beydoun and I mentored and signed. The court held that torture by a private contractor was subject to judicial review. Of course, the courtroom struggle is only one part of the necessary process. We have never been able to depend on the judges to get it right the first time, or all the time, or even sometimes at all. More significantly, what we as lawyers say and do in the courtroom is simply the noise made by banging on an empty pot -- unless we enlist our skills in the service of people who decry injustice and unless we come to understand their stories. I wrote about my own path in Fighting Injustice, which you can buy on Amazon. You can read about the narratives of oppressed people in "Narratives of Oppression" (17 Human Rights Brief 34-35, 2009). In my play Haymarket: Whose Name the Few Still Say with Tears, I imagined conversations between the anarchist leader Lucy Parsons and Clarence Darrow. They were arguing about whether this struggle for human rights really matters. The play ends with this:
Maybe Lucy is right to be skeptical about the limits on our power. But she surely wanted a lawyer when she was arrested. And we as lawyers must take for ourselves the kindly words of Thomas Merton, who warned that overmuch worrying about whether we are going to succeed can paralyze us so that we stop struggling against injustice. The play's reference to Altgeld is to Governor John Peter Altgeld, Darrow's friend and mentor. As I looked back at the play, and thought about the recent election, I turned back to Lindsay's poem about the election of 1896, in which the progressive movement was set back by the moneyed interests behind McKinley. You will recall that the McKinley administration embarked on a militaristic imperial campaign that swept former Spanish possessions under the American yoke, and which Theodore Roosevelt celebrated with racist rhetoric that will sound familiar to those who have been listening to election cycle speeches. It is not a perfect "fit," but the poem is worth re-reading: "Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan." Coda In 1989, Justice William Brennan asked me to come to his office at the Supreme Court to help him with a speech he was to give. We spent a good hour and half at work in his office and then he walked me down the little hallway between his office and the reception area where his secretary sat. On the way out, he took my arm and asked earnestly, "Did I do any good up here?" I said yes. The point of this story is that we will all wonder that same thing, but our wondering should not stop us from doing our work. Michael E. Tigar is Emeritus Professor of Law at Duke University and Emeritus Professor of Law at Washington College of Law. He has been a lawyer working on social change issues for many years. His books include Law and the Rise of Capitalism (Monthly Review Press, second edition, 2000), Fighting Injustice (ABA Press, 2002), and Thinking About Terrorism: The Threat to Civil Liberties in Times of National Emergency (ABA Press, 2007). |