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Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., on January 11, 2006.
Moving the Bar: My Life as a Radical Lawyer by Michael Ratner, just published by OR Books, is a vivid memoir of a storied attorney. The author died before it was completed, but the manuscript was placed into the capable hands of Zachary Sklar, a former executive editor at The Nation magazine, Oscar-nominated screenwriter, and son of a blacklisted screenwriter.
Ratner famously stood up against the torture and abuse of prisoners by U.S. troops in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, during the criminal invasion of Iraq and after.
Older readers of The Progressive especially will know Ratner’s name from his fighting to defend the victims of capitalism’s cruelties, and when the opportunity emerged, advancing civil freedoms to new heights in the process.
Michael Steven Smith, a decades-long colleague of Ratner’s at the Center for Constitutional Rights, supplies a highly useful foreword referencing their thirty-five year collaboration and offers us a glimpse of Ratner, ever-modest about himself. Ratner, less a theorist than an activist, defined himself by what he did. On a piece of paper taped on the wall near his desk, he wrote these four principles:
- Do not refuse to take a case just because it has long odds of winning in court;
- Use cases to publicize a radical critique of U.S. policy and to promote revolutionary transformation;
- Combine legal work with political advocacy;
- Love people.
It is safe to say that he lived by them.
Ratner grew up in Cleveland in a prosperous but distinctly non-political family. He attended Brandeis University, studied English and Anthropology, and barely escaped inheriting his father’s building supply business, going to law school instead. He took a leave of absence from Columbia University Law school in 1967 to work in Baltimore with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. His priorities were set by student demonstrations at Columbia University, where he returned to its law school in 1968, and especially the assault by New York City police on student protesters. He would become a wide-ranging radical lawyer.
Ratner is best known within the legal profession and among civil libertarians for heading the Center for Constitutional Rights, also serving as president of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, as president of the National Lawyers Guild, and as a founder of Palestine Legal. But he is far more famous for his super-dramatic cases.
Ratner famously stood up against the torture and abuse of prisoners by U.S. troops in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, during the criminal invasion of Iraq and after. He was chosen as the key witness in a mock trial staged by the Bush Crimes Commission at Columbia University. He joined others in supporting Chelsea Manning, and represented Julian Assange—the truth-telling journalist and publisher of WikiLeaks.
The U.S. government was not able to stop the horrifying revelations of WikiLeaks from reaching a wide public audience. This meant nothing less than “the unraveling of governments and corporations all over the world,” Ratner wrote.
The truth is dangerous. Assange now sits in the notorious London Belmarsh prison awaiting extradition to the United States to be tried for espionage, while his real crime was embarrassing the U.S. government. Had he lived, Ratner would have been heading up Assange’s defense legally and politically.
Ratner, in his book, takes us back to the early days of the Center for Constitutional Rights in 1971 at a hole-in-the-wall office and on skimpy pay, run as a collective, meeting each challenge as it came.
His first assignment was defending the inmates at Attica state prison in New York after the 1971 bloody military assault on them. A series of civil rights cases followed, as authorities chose Black and brown people for prosecution—i.e., persecution.
Help for revolutionaries and reformers across Central and South America followed, as the Reagan Administration intensified the habitual behavior of the United States, known as the Monroe Doctrine, to intervene militarily or otherwise at will, without any need for legal or moral cause.
Working within the system of precedents to extract as much freedom as possible—sometimes assisted by a wing of the Democrats while opposed by others more hawkish—Ratner and the Center for Constitutional Rights won a handful of victories as the United States mostly imposed its will upon the victims.
Civil lawsuits were launched against the U.S. government’s favorite pet dictators, notorious in particular for near-genocidal attacks on Indigenous villages, notably in Guatemala where the CIA had overthrown an elected government in 1954, to the applause of many American liberals as well as conservatives, and put the monsters in charge.
Hector Gramajo, a veteran of the U.S. Army-run School of the Americas and of the Kennedy School, died before he could be prosecuted. But his case supplied an opening for pursuing other cases against individuals or governments in Haiti, Argentina, and Israel, among other places. The defendants rarely suffered personally, beyond their reputations, but a wide, global public was alerted to the misdeeds accepted, sponsored, or directly funded by U.S. governments.
Toward the end of the century, Ratner and his colleagues moved to protect Native Americans from assaults on their tribal lands, to regain lands lost, and to begin rebuilding their cultures. In 1987, Pseudo-treaties of the nineteenth century had allowed the federal government to seize thousands of acres of Chippewa lands in Minnesota.
A federal decision had ratified the seizure by admitting wrong-doing and concluding that nothing could be done now to reverse past acts. It was a loss, but some land could, at least, be bought back. They also found ways to protect Bolivian Indigenous culture, recovering sacred textiles that had been taken to the United States in 1985.
The last major chapter in Ratner’s story belongs to Guantanamo, where he helped organize 600 American lawyers from firms large and small. They represented prisoners held at the naval base, most never even charged with crimes, successfully insisting at the Supreme Court that the facility was a de facto part of the United States, and therefore, even these prisoners had habeas corpus rights.
Regrettably, the associated petition for the criminal prosecution of Donald Rumsfeld, President George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense, and others for wrongful imprisonment and torture was not successful. This perhaps stands as a metaphor of Ratner’s triumphs and disappointments: cases brought wide public attention to government and corporate wrongdoing. The wrongdoers were, are, and are likely to be too powerful to be prosecuted. But their deeds can be brought into light.
There is so much more here, chapter by chapter, from the 1970s up to Ratner’s life-robbing illness, that the reader can take in, along with Ratner’s self-presentation, how he understood cases over the decades, how he figured out strategies and worked so furiously—and also brilliantly—to make those strategies work.
Dig in, reader. You are in for a treat, and an education.