Leonard Weinglass remembered - Newark and the Chicago 7

Leonard Weinglass and William Kunstler speak to the press during the Chicago 7 trial

In September 1970 I arrived in Newark at Rutgers Law School - to work on the Chicago 7 appeal.  Tom Hayden's lawyer Len Weinglass's office was opposite Ackerson Hall on Bleecker Street.  It was a little brick one-man shop.  But he had founded a law firm with recent grads that would be known as the Newark Law Commune.  A hyper egalitarian movement - the law communes pledged to share and share alike.  Even legal workers were to be paid the same and have a voice.  Egalitarianism required that the law firm's name be in alphabetical order.  At that moment it was Ball, Broege, Elberg, Fogel & Weinglass.   The personnel changed quickly but the core group bought a brick town house around the corner.  Len returned for a few years to the routine practice that had been his before fame overtook him via the Chicago 8, then 7 case.  

The overwhelmed trial judge Julius Hoffman had ordered Black Panther Party leader Bobby Seale bound and gagged in his chair in the courtroom before severing him from the rest of the motley crew of pacifists, anarchists, earnest activists, and militants who called themselves "The Conspiracy".  They had, the U.S. charged in its indictment , crossed state lines to incite a riot at the Democratic Convention in Chicago.  Prof. Arthur Kinoy had recruited a cadre of young activists - of which I was one - to come to Newark to work on the appeals.  Five of the seven had been convicted.  


All seven defendants and two lawyers- Weinglass and William Kunstler - had been  held in contempt of court for their vigorous advocacy. The contempt citations of Len, Bill, and the defendants were overturned - through the work of the brilliant Newark lawyer Morton Stavis, a founder of the Center for Constitutional Rights - which had just moved from Newark to an office above a paint store on 9th Avenue in the 40's .


The criminal convictions too were reversed.  A team of law students had helped Kinoy with the massive brief - two points of which I had drafted in my first semester of law school.  Not much of my attention went to coursework that term.  I was busy with the Chicago cases (my then wife Margo Anderson was paid staff), and preparing for my comprehensives for my masters' degree at BU where I had studied with Howard Zinn.
The Times obit tells the rest of the story HERE
And the Guardian, a few dates later, is HERE