Center for Constitutional Rights

Hi all! Greetings from…New York City, where I am interning this summer with the Center for Constitutional Rights. CCR is a legal and advocacy organization, founded by the radical lawyer William Kunstler in the 1960s. It started out by defending freedom activists and the civil rights movement in the South, and while the scope of the litigation has expanded to include an international human rights docket the mission stays basically the same: to use the law ‘proactively’ to create social change.

My work here is varied and fascinating—I am assigned to several cases that are in different stages of litigation, including a FOIA Ghost Detainee & Extraordinary Rendition case; an Abu Ghraib torture case involving Titan; and I am also working on resettlement policy for detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

Of course, being at CCR a few weeks ago when the Boumediene v. Bush decision came out was exciting and inspiring. CCR was co-counsel on the case, which by a 5-4 decision at the Supreme Court held that detainees at Guantanamo Bay could bring habeas corpus claims in U.S. Federal court. Following the establishment of Gitmo for ‘war on terror’ detainees, CCR was the first organization to represent detainees there, and now serves as a sort of central coordinator for all Guantanamo habeas counsel. Now, of course, Guantanamo Bay detainee representation is a matter of deep principle and commitment from all corners of the legal community, and plenty of major firms and law school clinics serve as habeas counsel for Gitmo detainees (including Professor Ratner’s IHR clinic at Fordham). For a long time, though, CCR was an outlier and an outcast from the legal community, principled stand, facing strong vilification and condemnation. (Old habits die hard, I guess, though—there is very good reason to believe that the U.S. government is illegally spying on habeas counsel for Gitmo detainees, severely compromising attorney-client confidentiality).

CCR calls its summer interns “Ella Baker Fellows,” so a word on that before I check out—Ella Baker was a “hero of the civil rights movement,” who lived a life straight from a novel. She spent her life devoted to the poor, the disenfranchised, and fighting for the civil rights and voting rights movement in the South. Ella Baker worked with Martin Luther King as Executive Director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and had a tremendous influence on the more radical Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

Working at CCR is a bittersweet, I must admit; it forces me to take a very detailed look at the ugly parts of U.S. policy regarding human rights and constitutional rights. The sheer scope of the human rights and civil rights violations committed by the U.S. over the last 8 years is overwhelming and could easily make cynics out of dedicated advocates for change or the most optimistic lawyer. Still, the lawyers at CCR are superbly talented, and their string of victories in a number of important SCOTUS cases (Rasul and Boumediene, for starters) go along way to instilling faith in the functionality of our constitutional system.

In any case, I'd love to hear what everybody is else is doing and see some more pictures from different parts of the world!

P.S.: On July 10th, CCR interns will challenge ACLU interns--including current Leitner Intern Amal Bouhabib--to a kickball match. Stay posted for details on how badly Amal & the ACLU are going to lose.