Word: boudin
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Although Boudin says he "slid by accident into the law," his progress was almost inevitable. His father was a real-estate lawyer in Brooklyn; young Boudin spent his Saturdays clipping law journals in his father's office. Following law school at St. John's, he joined his uncle's firm, which specialized in trade-union cases. He had just set up his own practice when the cold war started, and Boudin undertook to defend union clients against charges of Communist influence. Did he have ideological reasons? "Not at all," he says. "I not only was never...
...Most of Boudin's union clients left him after he was assigned by the trial court to represent Judith Coplon, a Justice Department analyst charged with espionage for the Soviet Union. (Ironically, her case, like the Ellsberg impasse last week, turned on a wiretap; Boudin won the Coplon appeal because authorities had eavesdropped on lawyer-client conversations.) Filling the gap in his practice, he began to make a name for himself in a series of passport cases: he diligently represented such noted left-wingers as Corliss Lamont, Paul Robeson and Rockwell Kent in proceedings that finally resulted...
Despite his activity in radical causes, Boudin remains an independent. "I don't like dogmatism," he says. "I don't like organization. I don't like public or private bureaucracy, and the whole trouble with left-wing movements is so much private bureaucracy." Nor has he limited his political practice (which earns him no more than about $30,000 a year) to left-wing cases. He also won the reinstatement of Julian Bond to the Georgia legislature, and he overturned the ban on Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer...
...Michael, 33, practices with one of Washington's most prestigious law firms; his daughter Kathy, 29, allegedly became a Weatherwoman and was seen leaving a Manhattan town house that had just been destroyed in a 1970 bomb explosion. Kathy is still on the FBI's Wanted list. Boudin declines to talk about...
...Although Boudin has spent a life devoted to the law, he remains skeptical of some of its major institutions-particularly the courts. Citing the "deference to the Executive, the unwillingness to decide issues relating to the legality of the war," he says: "All of this makes me less sure that the law is the answer I once thought it was." He rejects the violent alternative apparently chosen by his daughter, and has almost equally strong doubts about the process of education (though he lectured at Harvard last year). "While I see no alternative but to continue the process," he says...