Anna Bninski ‘23
Executive Editor
The National Lawyers Guild, long known as the lefty answer to the American Bar Association, has belatedly discovered the joys of property rights—specifically, the rights of lawyers to safeguard their stuff from interference (and maybe to get more and better property, too).
The abrupt about-face from the Guild’s eighty-four-year history of focusing on public interest work promoting the rights of marginalized populations was announced on the NLG’s National President’s blog:[1]
I had one of those moments today. You know, those moments where the blinders fall off, and you just have to question everything that you were certain about before. When you have to interrogate your assumptions about the way things are and the way that they are supposed to be.
This morning, while my fair-trade oatmeal was cooking in my solar-powered, cruelty-free microwave, I was looking for my paperback copy of The Communist Manifesto. “Babe,” I said to my partner, “have you seen Karl?[2] I know I left him on the counter.”
They barely looked up from their coffee. “Yeah, I put it in the Little Free Library, since you have a hardcover Manifesto by the bed and that mini one in the bathroom.”
“Oh, okay,” I said. “That’s fine.” But it wasn’t fine. My frustration was boiling over, just like my oatmeal, so I took it out of the microwave. (The oatmeal, I mean. My frustration was harder to deal with.)
Since my oatmeal was still too hot to eat without pouring something cold on it, and the only thing I had in the fridge was oat milk, and that combo seems wrong somehow, I took a quick walk down the block to the Little Free Library. Actually, I found myself running. My book—would my book still be there?
As I approached the Little Free Library, I saw that a parent and small child were checking out the contents.
“This man looks like Uncle Dan,” the kid said. “I like his beard.”
I recognized the book in the kid’s hands. I knew well that the front cover did feature a glorious beard.
“THAT’S MY BOOK!” I shouted. “YOU CAN’T HAVE KARL!”
Pictured: Don’t try to steal my man. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
“Sweetie,” said the parent, “we’ll come back for a book tomorrow. It looks like someone here is having a red-light moment[3] and needs time to cool down.”
As they retreated, I ran forward and retrieved Karl. I cradled that battered paperback, and I knew: This book was my property, and no one, I mean no one, was going to take it from me again.
I shared this story with the NLG Board. And it turns out, once one person tells their story, others are willing to come forward and say: Stuff is important to me. No one should be allowed to interfere with my stuff.
So I’d like to raise awareness about a critical problem facing society today. Society includes lawyers, and every day, lawyers are forced to do things like pay taxes and allow postal delivery people onto their property. Sometimes, lawyers’ partners use their FAVORITE T-SHIRTS as pajamas and then those shirts SOMEHOW end up in the partner’s dresser, instead of the lawyer’s dresser, and then SOMEHOW they end up covered in mustard stains.
I know this pivot may come as a surprise to some of our members, who joined NLG in order to do things like prevent unjust policing, safeguard activists, and support immigrant communities. And I’m not saying that we’ll stop doing those things.
But it’s time to take a stand for lawyers everywhere. I’m calling on our legal observer teams to observe carefully: When you see a lawyer’s rights being violated, speak out.
Requests for comment from the NLG Board have been met with responses such as “Get off my lawn” and “Your email is trespassing in my inbox. You have been notified.”
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amb6ag@virginia.edu
[1] The actual NLG president seems like a very admirable person who would never keep a copy of the Communist Manifesto in the bathroom.
[2] Yes, I know that Friedrich E. was also involved in writing that whole deal, but he’s not a celeb with star power like Karl.
[3] This refers to a system of red-yellow-green categorization system that can help small children describe their emotional states before they develop a nuanced vocabulary sufficient to describe the mens rea attached to the crime of “disorderly conduct with intent to tantrum.” (Law students seem to operate in a perpetual red.)