Joseph Forer

Joseph Forer (1910–1986) was a 20th-Century American attorney who, with partner David Rein, supported Progressive causes including discriminated communists and African-Americans. They were members of the National Lawyers Guild and its DC chapter. Forer was an expert in the "Lost Laws" of Washington, DC, enacted in 1872–1873, that outlawed segregation at business places.

Forer received his BA from Rutgers University and law degree from the University of Pennsylvania.

In the 1930s, like his friend David Rein, Forer worked for the National Labor Relations Board and the Office of Price Administration during the New Deal.

In 1946, David Rein joined Joseph Forer as private practice law partners in Washington, DC. Together, they "represented more than 100 persons who had been termed 'unfriendly' witnesses by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee of the Senate subcommittee headed by the late senator Joseph McCarthy."

As historian Joan Quigley describes:

In the late 1940s, while Congress and the executive branch trawled for evidence of disloyalty and subversion, Rein and Forer immersed themselves in difficult and disfavored causes: opposing the Mundt-Nixon Bill; defending labor unions and alleged Communists; upholding the Bill of Rights. Rein... represented Gerhard Eisler... As progressives and New Deal veterans, Forer and Rein also nurtured ties to the National Lawyers Guild, which HUAC had branded a Communist front in 1944.

Forer was chairman of the District Affairs Committee of the DC chapter of the National Lawyers Guild.

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