William Moses Kunstler was an American lawyer and civil rights activist. Known for defending the Chicago Seven from 1969 to 1970. Also well known for defending members of the Revolutionary Communist Party, Catonsville Nine, Black Panther Party, Weather Underground Organization, and the Attica Prison rioters.
About William Kunstler in brief
William Moses Kunstler was an American lawyer and civil rights activist. Known for defending the Chicago Seven from 1969 to 1970. Also well known for defending members of the Revolutionary Communist Party, Catonsville Nine, Black Panther Party, Weather Underground Organization, and the Attica Prison rioters. He won a de facto segregation case regarding the District of Columbia’s public schools and singlehandedly invented the concept of federal criminal removal jurisdiction in the 1960s. He was a polarizing figure; many on the right wished to see him disbarred. Many on the left admired him as a \”symbol of a certain kind of radical lawyer.’’ He was an avid poet and represented Yale in the Glascock Prize competition at Mount Holyoke College. He served in the U.S. Army during World War II in the Pacific theater. He rose to the rank of Major, and received the Bronze Star. After his discharge from the Army he attended law school, was admitted to the bar in New York in 1948 and began practicing law. He went through R. H. Macy’s executive training program in the late 1940s and practiced family and small business law in the 1950s. In 1962, he took part in efforts to integrate public parks and libraries in Albany, Georgia. Later that year he published The Courage Case for Courage, highlighting the efforts of lawyers who risked their careers to cancel their careers for other lawyers who did the same.
He died of a heart attack in 1973 at the age of 67. He is survived by his wife, two daughters, and a son. He had a son, Michael, who is a lawyer and a step-grandfather, who was also a lawyer. He also had a daughter, Jennifer, who worked as a lawyer in New Jersey. She is the co-founder of the Law Center for Constitutional Rights, the country’s leading gathering place for radical lawyers in the country. She died in 2008. She was a mother-of-three and a grandmother-of two. She had a great-grandson, Michael Kunstlers, who also works as a attorney and a grandfather-of one. She passed away in 2011 at age 83. She has a daughter who is also a attorney, Jennifer Kunstles, who works for the ACLU and the American Civil Liberties Union. She also has a son who is an attorney and has worked on civil rights cases since the 1970s, including the Freedom Riders in Mississippi and the New York City City Board of Education cases against the City of New York and the Department of Justice. She wrote a book, “The Courage Case,” about her experiences as a civil rights lawyer in the ’60s and ’70s. Her son Michael is now a New York State Supreme Court justice. He has also served as a judge on the New Jersey Supreme Court and served as the chief judge on New Jersey’s First Daughters of the American Revolution and New Jersey First Ladies’ Court of Appeal.
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This page is based on the article William Kunstler published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 23, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
