Fordham National Lawyers Guild

Founded in 1937 as the first racially integrated bar association in the United States, the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) provides a political home for anti-racists, anti-capitalists and anti-imperialists throughout the legal profession. The Fordham chapter connects its members with a community of like-minded law students and legal practitioners – both within Fordham and across the city – which presents continual opportunities for collaboration, solidarity and learning from each other. NLG trains students to safeguard protesters’ rights through its Legal Observer program and reexamines core legal curricula from oppositional perspectives such as Critical Race Theory. It also facilitates discussions and political actions in which the law is used and understood as a tool for supporting social justice movements and bringing about a world in which “human rights and the rights of ecosystems shall be regarded as more sacred than property interests.”