People's Lawyer
Kinoy, Arthur
People's Lawyer RIGHTS ON TRIAL by Arthur Kinoy Harvard University Press. 340 pp. $20. Huey Long once said, "When fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in an American flag." That...
...Successful or not, all his legal strategies were forged in the "crucible of reality," Kinoy observes...
...In example after depressing example, he shows that when push comes to shove, the liberal establishment which echoes concerns of the Left always finds a reason not to march, not to strike, not to be obstreperous...
...Although he does not say it directly, Kinoy's sympathies are clear...
...Now a professor of law at Rutgers University, Kinoy is an able attorney whose landmark victories—Dombrowski v. Pfis-ter, Powell v. McCormick—make lawyers of all political stripes take notice...
...In devoting four decades of his life to the defense of communists, union leaders, blacklisted artists, and the victims of racism, Kinoy changed the face of the law...
...His own words best describe his preference for the direct-action tactics of the Left over the more accommodating strategies of mainstream liberalism...
...Without the legal archeology which led to the discovery of dozens of dusty Reconstruction laws, freedom marchers would have languished in Southern prisons, and the civil rights movement would have stalled...
...That prescient observation is probably all that the demagogic Long and radical lawyer Arthur Kinoy have in common...
...to the warrantless wiretapping of the Nixon Administration...
...And so Rights on Trial is very much an adventure, albeit a lawyerly one...
...From his first labor case in Cleveland in 1947 to his victorious defense of the Chicago Seven in their appeal in 1971, Kinoy became well-acquainted with the patriotic guises of repression...
...He has tirelessly rooted through legal texts, parsed constitutional phrases, and unearthed ancient statutes...
...A trio of mainstream liberals—Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, and Joseph Rauh—refused even to hear blacks' protests about the lily-white complexion of the Mississippi delegation to the 1964 Democratic Party convention...
...Vivid scenes abound...
...And because Kinoy is a raconteur as well as a lawyer, Rights on Trial is no bland work of legal theory...
...There is the remarkable Judge Aikens of Danville, Virginia, the last capital of the Confederacy, who twirls a gun as he sits in arrogant judgment of arrested civil rights workers...
...But, as this peppery autobiography shows, it is a truth that Kinoy has witnessed many times...
...And Kinoy dismisses that apex of Supreme Court liberalism, the 1954 outlawing of segregation in Brown v. Board of Education, as "a beautiful, clear statement for all the world to hear, and with no enforcement [mechanisms] to endanger the white power structure...
...He quotes one union member: "You mean we're going to make them defendants...
...He knew the suit would fail, and he knew it didn't matter...
...The characters range from racist Sheriff Rainey of Jackson, Mississippi, to the scholarly Southern jurist John Minor Wisdom, and the action runs from the battle over the Congressional seat of Adam Clayton Powell Jr...
...For instance, Jerome Frank, an architect of the New Deal, refused Kinoy's plea to stay the Rosenberg executions even though he, Kinoy claims, admitted the validity of Kinoy's legal arguments...
...In 1948, Kinoy filed an audacious suit against a Congressional committee which was attacking a beleaguered union in Evansville, Illinois...
...NAACP liberals, according to Kinoy, counseled patience in the wake of the mass arrests of civil rights workers in Danville, Virginia...
...in so doing he has protected the Left and torn away the mantle of constitutionality in which "the system," as he calls it, cloaks itself...
...The case was lost, but the union endured...
...Launch the counterattack," he urges throughout Rights on Trial...
...There is another, more unsettling tale BOOKS in this leftist lawyer's book...
...take the offensive" and learn "how to turn the tables...
...As Kinoy suggests, without radical lawyers' dogged digging into the history of the grand jury and the Fifth Amendment, scores of prominent unionists would have been jailed and the militant labor movement would have foundered...
...There is the harrowing and fruitless car trip through Connecticut as Kinoy, armed with a new legal argument, tries to round up two Federal appeals judges to stop the executions of the Rosenbergs a few hours before their deaths...
...Through it all we traipse after Kinoy, who is criss-crossing the country under a somewhat self-deprecating motto coined by William Kunstler: "Have writ, will travel...
...The image is apt: Kinoy sees himself as a craftsman of the Left, the laborer who fashions the legal theories that people's movements need...
...Privy to nearly all the progressive movements in postwar America, Kinoy seems to have concluded that the "truly independent Left," as he calls it, faces more foes than the Joe McCarthys and the John Eastlands and the Richard Nixons...
...And there is that golden day in Jackson, Mississippi, when Kinoy, William Kunstler, and other "people's lawyers" dredge up a venerable if unused Reconstruction Era law which allows them to challenge the racist election system in the South...
...There is no false modesty in his metaphor...
...Even unsuccessful legal ploys had their uses...
...The idea of suing witch-hunting Congressmen was enough to shore up the spirit of a flagging union...
...Francis J. Flaherty (Francis J. Flaherty, a contributing editor of The Progressive, is a reporter for the National Law Journal...
Vol. 48 • May 1984 • No. 5
