Every lawyer knows that Clarence Darrow represented the teacher in the 1925 Scopes "monkey trial" case, but few know he did so as a volunteer attorney to the American Civil Liberties Union.

American Bar Association members are familiar with the career of their former president, Whitney North Seymour, but how many know that in 1937, when he argued Herndon v. Lowry (one of the earliest Supreme Court decisions protecting free speech against abridgement by state government), he did so as an ACLU volunteer? For 60 years at every level - from small claims courts to the Supreme Court - volunteer lawyers have been the back-bone of the ACLU legal program.

Volunteers handled the protracted but successful school desegregation cases in Los Angeles, Louisville, and Seattle, and the nearly successful case in Atlanta. Teams of ACLU volunteers represented thousands of anti-Vietnam War demonstrators and non-participation bystanders who were illegally arrested in a dragnet roundup in the nation's capital in what has come to be known as the "May Day Arrests,"and eventually they won settlements of judgments of several million dollars.
When a major company fired the assistant manager of a branch office because she had allegedly violated a company rule against "living out of wedlock" with someone of the opposite sex, volunteers James Brosnahan and Harold McElhinny of Morrison, Foerster, Holloway, Clinton & Clark sued in California state court under a 1972 amendment to the state constitution that the California branches of the ACLU had helped to adopt. Unlike the Federal Constitution even the California Constitution prevents private employers from unduly abridging the privacy rights of their employees. On the eve of trial, the company abandoned that rule.

These examples illustrate the broad range of issues litigated by lawyers who volunteer their service to the ACLU. For 60 years* volunteers have provided free legal representation to people whose civil liberties have been violated. Those volunteers have included sole practitioners, recent law school graduate, some of the nation's most prominent lawyers, and many of the major firms in America, including Covington & Burling, Hogan & Hartson, Wilmer & Pickering and Arnold & Porter in Washington, D.C.; O'Melveny & Myers in California; Jenner & Block, Schiff Hardin & Waite, and Sidley & Austin in Chicago; and Hale & Dorr in Boston. Roughly $15,000,000 worth of free legal services are contributed each year by the private bar and by law school professors. (*Now almost 90 years)

Without these volunteers our legal program would collapse. More than 90 per cent of our current annual docket of about 6,000 cases is handled by the approximately 5,000 unpaid lawyers who volunteer their legal services each year to protect civil liberties. This remarkable contribution has not received the public recognition it deserves. At a time of diminished public respect for lawyers, it is well to remember that for years a substantial segment of the bar has taken seriously its ethical responsibility to provide free legal service to persons whose rights would otherwise be unrepresented.

The ACLU was founded *60 years ago by a small but distinguished group of conscientious objectors, feminists, and civil libertarians. Early members included Felix Frankfurter, Helen Keller, Roger Baldwin (still active in 1980 at the age of 96) NormanThomas, and Jeanette Rankin, the first woman elected to Congress. They realized that "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" — the ACLU motto — and set about to create a stable, permanent organization that would be there, year after year, to protect civil liberties. They knew that without steady pressure, civil liberties victories won in one generation would be lost in the next.

They were right. Today, for example, ACLU lawyers are representing the son and daughter of Linda Brown, the plaintiff in Brown v. Board of Education. As their mother did 26 years ago, they contend that the Topeka school system, in which more than half of the schools are all white, is still a racially segregated system.

Each year the ACLU is involved in more Supreme Court Litigation than anyone but the solicitor general of the United States—about 50 or 100 cases per year. ACLU volunteers have argued many significant cases in the Court and have earned the respect of the Court in the process. As Justice Powell, a former president of the ABA recently wrote in deciding a case argued by a volunteer: "ACLU has only entered cases in which substantial civil liberties questions are involved... It has engaged in the defense of unpopular causes and unpopular defendants and has represented individuals in litigation that has defined the scope of constitutional protection in areas such as political dissent, juvenile rights, prisoners' rights, Military law, amnesty and privacy."

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