Weinrib on Law, History, and the Interwar ACLU's Jewish Lawyers @Harvard_Law @OUPLaw

Laura Weinrib, Harvard Law School, is publishing Law, History, and the Interwar ACLU's Jewish Lawyers in In Between and Across: Legal History Without Borders (Jacob Katz Cogan & Kenneth Mack, eds., Oxford University Press, Forthcoming). Here is the abstract.

This chapter, for an edited volume on legal history honoring the career of Hendrik Hartog, explores the influence of Jewish lawyers’ identity on the strategies and goals of the interwar ACLU and, more broadly, on the emergence in the United States of a constitutional and court-centered concept of civil liberties. Between World War I and World War II, the ACLU evolved from a radical organization frankly committed to the demise of capitalism to an outspoken proponent of political liberalism and judicially enforceable individual rights. During the same period, nearly all of the ACLU’s lawyers—who increasingly defined the organization’s agenda and steered its activity from direct action to litigation—were Jewish. Many of them believed that the best bulwark against totalitarianism in America was to prohibit state-sanctioned orthodoxy, whether religious or ideological. That principle, however, manifested in vastly different visions of how free speech should be understood and implemented. This chapter evaluates the ways in which their experiences as Jews affected their views on pluralism, state power, minority rights, and judicial review. It focuses on the debate within the ACLU and between the ACLU and Jewish organizations over hate speech, group defamation, and the role of law in countering antisemitism. It argues that for the ACLU’s Jewish lawyers, casting civil liberties as core to American democracy served to deflect accusations of foreignness and to assert their belonging in a shared, if imagined, national heritage.

Download the chapter from SSRN at the link.