ACLU GC Frank Askin, Rutgers Constitutional Scholar, Champion of the Underdog | New Jersey Law Journal

Frank and his wife Marilyn were devoted supporters of Rutgers Law School..

I was Frank's research assistant as a rising 2L in 1971.  We worked that summer on the police surveillance case Anderson v Sills   The next year I worked with him on the Supreme Court brief in Tatum v. Laird. which challenged Pentagon surveillance of lawful political activity.

Frank had been a journalist. He had a weekly column in the Newark Evening Nes.  He asked me to draft a few columns but didn't think I had the knack.  Maybe I didn't at the time.

In 1982 I represented Frank in a ballot position challenge against Essex County Clerk Nick Caputo whose lottery always gave the incumbent Line A.

Frank's hopeless crusade that year was to unseat Congressman Joseph Minish - a blue dog who touched every base that needed to be touched. - GWC

Colleagues Remember ACLU GC Frank Askin, Rutgers Constitutional Scholar, Champion of the Underdog | New Jersey Law Journal

by Charles Toutant

Frank Askin, a Rutgers Law School professor for 50 years and a longtime general counsel of the American Civil Liberties Union, died at age 89 on July 1.

He spent his career fighting for individual rights, winning courtroom victories for activists who sought to distribute leaflets in shopping malls and for condominium residents seeking to post political signs in front of their homes. In one of his best-known cases, he won a ruling in 1991 for Richard Kreimer, a homeless man banned from the Morristown public library because his body odor was deemed offensive, although that decision was overturned on appeal.

“The common thread is everybody has the First Amendment right to free speech and for Kreimer, the First Amendment right to information. He was always for the underdog,” said Bruce Rosen of McCusker, Anselmi, Rosen & Carvelli in Florham Park, who was then a fledgling attorney who worked with Askin on the Kreimer case.

Askin graduated from Rutgers Law School in Newark with highest honors in 1966 and was directly appointed to the faculty, where he taught labor law, election law and constitutional law. In 1970, he established the Constitutional Litigation Clinic.

Before law school, Askin worked as a reporter for The Record of Hackensack and other papers and had a stint as executive director of the Bergen County Democratic Party. He later ran for Congress—without success—in 1982 and 1986.

“I have always viewed myself as a public-interest lawyer, a calling that is unique to the United States, where our constitutional system has made courts of law into potent vehicles of change,” he wrote in “Defending Rights, A Life in Law and Politics,” his 1997 autobiography.

‘Trained generations’

A 2016 interview in the New Jersey State Bar Association’s Bar Report section of the Law Journal, asked about the high points of his career.

“My favorite thing was teaching my students how to become human rights lawyers,” Askin responded. “I’d bring second- and third-year law students into the courtroom with me and we’d take on controversial cases—cases that dealt with issues like government surveillance, racial profiling, affirmative action litigation, police misconduct.”

“Frank Askin has trained generations of public interest lawyers to use the law as an instrument of social justice, and is the senior mentor of much of the public interest bar in New Jersey,” said Ronald Chen, a professor and former co-dean of Rutgers Law School, in a 2015 profile of Askin in the Law Journal.

And Chen said in a Rutgers obituary of Askin that ”It was my honor to follow him in so many ways: we both were students (at different times) and then later professors (happily for me, often at the same time) here at the Law School. I was his colleague on the ACLU National Board for many years (where the ACLU President jokingly referred to us at Board meetings as ‘the Jersey Boys’), and I now hold the office that he held for decades, that of ACLU General Counsel. It was my privilege to work with him in the Constitutional Litigation Clinic on several difficult and impactful cases,” Chen said.

“He first taught me the benefits of relying on the New Jersey Constitution as the often preferred tool over the United States Constitution in expanding the reach of individual civil liberties, particularly speech,” Chen said.

Recalling other esteemed faculty members of Rutgers’ past, Chen asked, “Will we ever see their like again? Of course the answer is yes. For every great institution, as one generation passes, a new one must rise to take its place. But I confess that right now I personally cannot imagine holding any group of people in any higher awe and esteem as I do Rutgers Law’s ‘Greatest Generation,’ with Frank Askin leading the charge.”