Marjorie Cohn
Legendary people’s lawyer Leonard Weinglass defended the poor and disenfranchised who struggled for social justice in the great tradition of Clarence Darrow, Charles Garry, Ernest Goodman, William Kunstler, Carol Weiss King, Arthur Kinoy, Constance Baker Motley and Michael Ratner.
Weinglass is now immortalized in Len: A Lawyer in History, a valuable graphic historical work by cartoonist/writer Seth Tobocman. The book features some of Weinglass’ most significant cases, analyzing them in the historical context of the political movements in which they took place.
“I want to spend my time defending people who have committed their time to progressive change. That’s the criteria,” Weinglass said. “Now, that could be people in armed struggle, people in protest politics, people in confrontational politics, people in mass organizations, people in labor.” Weinglass’s calling, editor Michael Steven Smith noted in the book’s introduction, was defending people against “the machinery of the state.”
Weinglass, a longtime member of the National Lawyers Guild, was a brilliant attorney who empowered his clients. Unlike many lawyers, he understood that the case belongs to the client who must live with the consequences of the result. His clients had the final say about what strategy and tactics to employ. Weinglass took cases other lawyers would not, sometimes for no fee.
“[Weinglass] wasn’t drawn to making money. He was drawn to defending justice,” said Daniel Ellsberg, whose leak of the Pentagon Papers helped end the Vietnam War. “He felt in many cases he was representing one person standing against the state. He was on the side of the underdog. He was also very shrewd in his judgment of juries,” Ellsberg added.
A former military analyst and Marine who served in Vietnam, Ellsberg worked at the Rand Corp. and the Pentagon. He risked decades in prison to release 7,000 top-secret documents to The New York Times and other newspapers in 1971. The Pentagon Papers demonstrated how five presidents consistently lied to the American people about the Vietnam War that was killing thousands of Americans and millions of Indochinese.