My memory must be melting away faster than the polar caps. I was sure I remembered something on them in the lbo archives...sure enough. See below obit note on Walker which Dennis Claxton posted.
Below is a link to an interview with Ann Ginger:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=713215581291529425#
While I was looking around at the Meikeljohn Institute I suddenly started to remember all kinds of legal work and actions of the 60s-70s. This work and its concepts were `in the air', and in the speeches and acted as a training guide to both radical politics and radical action. Michael Tigar must have known them and or worked for them in some way. They set up the background to understand the Free Speech Movement.
Of course a lot of demonstrations were just rallies that may or may not end with police violence. But there were other demonstrations and speeches that were true training system to communicate what an earlier generation like Walker and Ginger had learned.
Doris Walker's most famous trial was as defence attorney for Anglia Davis. The obit was posted when Dennis Claxton asked about a book about Doris Walker.
``...From 1961 to 1977, Walker was a partner in a law practice with Robert Treuhaft, a prominent leftist who was married to Walker's close friend, writer Jessica Mitford. The firm, Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, hired Hillary Rodham, the future first lady and secretary of State, as an intern in 1971...''
http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-doris-walker23-2009aug23,0,4522095.story
What I want to say about both Walker and Ginger is what tremendous teachers they were. When Walker would hold a news conference, she used the opportunity to lecture on the law and the state. So the trial became a demonstration project to educate the people on their rights, the use of those rights and how to fight back against government and capital.
I would urge people to click on video link and listen. You will see immediately what I am talking about. Ginger teaches the interviewer, and the audience. For example, she explains how to report police misconduct on the Mexican border to the US government and the UN special rapporteur for human rights. What's important about these reports is that they are formally reviewed by the UN and the numbers of cases are made public. These numbers show how big the problem is and whether or not there is a systematic policy of abuse. It is really good stuff. These statistics are also important as legal documentation and are used in US courts against the government.
She explains the UN charters are treaties, and the US constitution says that treaties are enforced by the US government. Therefore the provisions against civil and human rights are also US law.
What's strange about all this for me, is I realize that many of my concepts and thoughts on how to change society came from these two women. These were the concepts and ideas that were `in the air' when I was in my twenties. I learned them so long ago, I forgot where they came from.
I bring this up because that's what we need more of today to re-construct a left movement. If you listen to the video, notice that Ginger de-constructs the entire rightwing agenda.
We talk about theory and its relationship to practice. Walker and Ginger show us how to do that through legal theory. In a manner of speaking, the theory of our society is to be found in its legal constructs, so if we want to change the society, we have to perform that change through the legal constructs that found it. The first example that popped into my mind was that corporations are virtual people and therefore have rights, therefore making campaign contributions protected speech?
They reminded me of other things I used to think about and forgot. The apparently empty slogan, Think global, Act locally, for example. Now go back and think about what Ginger was saying about the UN and US law. See? She was acting locally with state/federal case law, by thinking through the global sphere of UN laws and charters.
Another thing that Walker and Ginger added was the way to focus on issues of the day, and make a few critical items do a lot of the heavy lifting work of raising public awareness. For example the illegal nature of government action in prisoner abuse cases goes a long way towards explaining what's wrong with concept of a war on terror. Wars are by definition conflicts between two or more states. In the war on terror there is only one state actor and its action are in addition illegal. The authorization by written up by the executive branch is illegal, and more.
There are even fewer radical business/economics lawyers, but we could use some to de-construct the nonsense that there is such a thing as jobless recoveries...
This is getting too long...
CG