Vincent Hallinan

Vincent Hallinan (December 16, 1896 – October 2, 1992) was an American lawyer and a candidate for President of the United States for the Progressive Party in the 1952 election.

Hallinan was born into a large immigrant Irish-Catholic family and raised in San Francisco and Petaluma, California. His father Patrick was said to be a member of the Irish National Invincibles, a revolutionary organization that, among other activities, was reputed to have assassinated the Lord Mayor of Dublin and his secretary in 1881, the infamous Phoenix Park Murders, who then fled to the U.S. The elder Hallinan became a streetcar conductor in San Francisco, and was one of the leaders of the Great Front Strike of 1899–1900.

Trained by Jesuits in high school, Hallinan passed the California Bar at the age of 22, after studies at Saint Ignatius College and Law School, (now the University of San Francisco). He passed the California Bar Exam on the first time and before he had graduated from law school. He was a militant atheist.

His early successes in court included personal injury actions against the powerful Market Street Railway Company which ran most of the trolley lines on the streets of San Francisco and was a subsidiary of northern California rail interests. The rail company also owned the system whereby jurors' lists were kept and consulted by an appointed jury commissioner, in Hallinan's time an official of the railway, and he fought against this system for years before state law made the voter rolls the sole source of jurors.

Hallinan's years as a lawyer led to his selection in 1949, with a partner James Martin McInnis, to defend Harry Bridges of the ILWU on perjury charges arising from accusations that he had once been a Communist but had denied it.

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