Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute Archives

[Charles Brown <cbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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The Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute Archives include the best legal
"briefs," transcripts, and motions in cases reported in the Civil Liberties
Docket since 1955. For the law profession, these materials have served as a
major resource for lawyers involved in civil liberties cases anywhere in the
United States.

The Archives, originally a component of the Meiklejohn Civil Liberties
Library, builds upon the pioneering work of attorney and civil rights
activist Ann Fagan Ginger who conceived of an organization to foster
effective, innovative legal research, writing, and courtroom strategies to
be shared among all lawyers and clients in the constitutional law fields of
civil liberties, due process, and civil rights. In 1964 she described her
idea to the great civil libertarian Alexander Meiklejohn, who gave his
permission for the use of his name.


The Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Library opened its doors in Berkeley in 1965
and incorporated as a California nonprofit institution whose Board of
Directors included: Ann Fagan Ginger, I. Michael Heyman, and Marshall W.
Krause. Ann Rand, retired librarian for the International Longshoremen's and
Warehouseman's Union, became the first of innumerable, invaluable
volunteers. Law students active in the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley
came on Work Study grants to assist in developing and analyzing the
collections.

The volunteer and funded staff found a growing demand from across the
country from attorneys and others pursuing civil rights litigation. Almost
from the outset the Institute began producing books, sending out speakers,
and presenting testimony in Congress, while continuing to collect archival
material. In 1966, the first seven Work-Study students came to work and the
Law Students Civil Rights Research Council sent a student.

In the late 1960's, the Meiklejohn Institute expanded from its original
focus on U.S. Civil Rights and Civil Liberties to those related to United
Nations Human Rights issues. In 1973, the Institute published the Human
Rights Organizations and Periodicals Directory and started classifying cases
using the human rights language of the UN. The Institute convinced the
Library of Congress to follow their lead in this classification.

In 1979-80, Meiklejohn received a grant from the National Historical
Publications and Records Commission in Washington to make an inventory of
the records (and periodicals) at Meiklejohn of the National Lawyers Guild
(1936-76) and The Legal Struggle to Abolish the House Committee on
Un-American Activities (1963-1973). Later the papers of the Radical Elders
Oral History Project, partially transcribed, and much other (unsorted)
material, came to the Institute.

In 1999, Director Ann Fagan Ginger negotiated the transfer of the Meiklejohn
Civil Liberties Institute Archives, including the records of the National
Lawyers Guild to The Bancroft Library at the University of California,
Berkeley. The Bancroft Library hold some of largest bodies of records
documenting social action in the United States and California, including
records of the University of California Loyalty Oath Controversy, the Free
Speech Movement, the Social Protest Collection, and the Sara Diamond
Collection on the U.S. Right (1950-1997).

Partial List of Publications
Civil Liberties Docket 1968-1969.
Digests of unreported and reported cases on civil liberties, due process,
civil rights, law of the poor (1970)

Human Rights Casefinder: the Warren Court Era 1953-1969.
Where to find reports of federal and state cases (1969)

Angela Davis Case Collection.
Annotated procedural guide and index to all that creative pretrial and jury
selection material in California v. Davis (with Oceana Pubs)(1974)

Pentagon Papers Trial.
Index-Catalog to defense attacks on FBI practices in United States v.
Ellsberg and Russo (1975)

Human Rights Docket U.S. 1979.
Digests of 1,600 human rights cases on civil liberties, due process, equal
protection, economic and social rights, national and international rights.
(1979)