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 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."

The National Lawyers Guild was founded in Washington, D.C. at a convention held from February 19–22, 1937 at the Hotel Washington. Individuals particularly instrumental in the creation of the organization included Harold I. Cammer and George Wagman Fish, among others. Other founding members included Frank P. Walsh, Albert Wald, Morris Ernst, Jerome Frank, and Joseph Forer, as well as the general counsels of the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations. The first Executive Secretary of the organization was Mortimer Riemer.

According to Victor Rabinowitz, head of the NLG in the 1960s, the original membership of the organization came from two camps — established progressive attorneys with a labor-oriented perspective and "a militant segment of the bar, mostly young and sometimes radical."

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