National Lawyers' Guild

The National Lawyers Guild (NLG) is a progressive public interest association of lawyers, law students, paralegals, jailhouse lawyers, law collective members, and other activist legal workers, in the United States. The group was founded in 1937 as an alternative to the American Bar Association (ABA) in protest of that organization's exclusionary membership practices and conservative political orientation. They were the first US bar association to allow the admission of minorities to their ranks. The group sought to bring more lawyers closer to the labor movement and progressive political activities (e.g., the Farmer-Labor Party movement, to support and encourage lawyers otherwise "isolated and discouraged," and to help create a "united front" against Fascism.

The group declares itself to be "dedicated to the need for basic and progressive change in the structure of our political and economic system . . . to the end that human rights shall be regarded as more sacred than property interests." During the McCarthy era the organisation was accused of operating as a communist front group.

On December 1, 1936, nearly 25 East Coast lawyers met at the City Club of New York to discuss creation of a new group counter to the conservative American Bar Association. United Auto Workers general counsel Maurice Sugar was instrumental in calling the meeting. Lawyers present included: Morris Erst, Robert Silberstein and Mortimer Reimer of the Lawyers Security League, ACLU attorney Osmond Fraenkel, IJA-US founder Carol Weiss King, and union lawyer Henry Sacher. The group agreed on an aim to united "all lawyers who regarded adjustments to new conditions as more important than the veneration of precedent, who recognize the importance of safeguarding and extending the right of workers and farmers upon whom the welfare of the entire nation depends, of maintaining our civil rights and liberties and our democratic institutions." The group voted Frank P. Walsh, member of the New York State Power Authority. Within two weeks, Guild chapters had already formed in New York City, Newark, Detroit, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, St. Louis, and Chicago.

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